
Book 



GopiglitS?- 



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SElje HibersfiDe ^literature Series? 



ESSAY ON MILTON 



BY 



THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 



EDITED BY 

WILLIAM p. TRENT 







HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

Boston : 4 Park Street ; New York : 11 East Seventeenth Street 
Chicago : 158 Adams Street 



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Copyright, 1896, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton and Company. 



INTRODUCTION. 

There can be little doubt that Lord Macaulay is the 
most popular writer of English prose that this century has 
produced. Thousands of copies of his Historij of England 
are still sold every year, and travellers tell us that if an 
Australian settler possesses three books only, the first tvro 
will be the Bible and Shakespeare, and the third, Macau- 
lay's Essays. And yet his authority as a critic and histo- 
rian has been shaken, and his capacity as a poet — for his 
Lays of Ancient Rome is a very popular book — seriously 
questioned. Nor is his popularity confined to any one circle 
of readers. Cultivated men and women in their conversa- 
tion and writings assume a knowledge of his works as a 
matter of course, but the intelligent laboring man, who is 
striving for an education, is equally, perhaps more, familiar 
with tliem. It is plain that a writer who makes such a 
wide and lasting appeal deserves careful study, and that 
a brief survey of his life cannot be without interest. 

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born October 25, 1800, 
at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire. His father Zachary 
was a Scotchman of probity and talents, who was a dis- 
tinguished promoter of abolition. Macaulay, therefore, 
came honestly by the middle-class virtues and defects that 
are so salient in his character. He was a precocious, nay 
rather a wonderful child, but does not appear to have been 
spoiled. His memory was prodigious and his reading enor- 
mous, while his faculty for turning out hundreds of re- 
spectable verses was simply phenomenal. After a happy 
period of schooling he entered Cambridge, where he won 
prizes for verse, and made a reputation for himself as a 
scholar and speaker, but failed of the highest honors on 



iv MA CAUL AY. 

account of his inaptitude for mathematics. He gTaduated 
at twenty-two, was elected a Fellow of Trinity two years 
later, and the next year startled the world by his brilliant 
essay on Milton in the Edinburgh Review. From this time 
his career was one of almost unbroken success. He was 
called to the bar in 1826, but gave more time to his writing 
and to his political aspirations than to his profession. In 
1830 he was elected to the House of Commons through the 
patronage of Lord Lansdowne, and began his career as a 
staunch Whig at one of the most important crises in Eng- 
lish history, — that of the first Reform Bill. 

It is quite plain that if Macaulay had taken seriously to 
politics at this juncture he would have made a name for 
himself among English statesmen, or at least among Eng- 
lish orators. The speeches he delivered were enthusias- 
tically received, he stood high with the ministers of a party 
just coming into power, he had the courage of his convic- 
tions, he had the wide erudition tliat has been a tradition 
with English statesmen, and he had the practical abilit}- to 
conduct a political canvass (for the new borough of Leeds) ; 
but he liked the adulation of society a little too well, and his 
income was not sufficient to let him bide his time. Dinners 
at Holland House and breakfasts with Rogers were delight- 
ful, no doubt, as delightful as the letters in which he de- 
scribed them to his favorite sister Hannah ; and so too was 
the praise he got for his articles in the Edinburgh ; but this 
devotion to society and literature could hardly have been 
kept up along with an entirely serious and absorbing pur- 
suit of political honors. He was probably well advised, 
therefore, when in 1834 he accepted the presidency of a new 
law commission for India and a membership of the Supreme 
Council of Calcutta. It meant banishment, but it meant 
also a princely income of which half could be saved. So 
he set out, taking his sister Hannah with him, for he was a 
bachelor, discharged his duties admirably, and returned to 
England in 1838. 



INTRODUCTION. V 

On his return he reentered Parliament and served with 
distinction but not with conspicuous success. His genius 
had been diverted and his desires were more than ever 
divided. He obtained a seat in Lord John Russell's cabinet 
and supported the Whigs on all great questions, but ho was 
better known as the author of the Lays of Ancient Rome 
(1842) and the Essays. He lost his seat for Edinburgh in 
1847, having been too outspoken and liberal in his views, 
yet this meant little to one who was a student by nature 
and who was about to bring out the first two volumes of the 
most popular history ever written (1849). The remaining 
decade of his Mfe was practically the only period in which his 
energies were undivided. He was indeed reelected to Par- 
liament from Edinburgh without his solicitation, and he was 
raised to the peerage in 1857, being the first man to receive 
such an honor mainly for literary work ; but he did little be- 
sides labor on his History and make notable contributions 
to the EncyclopcBclia Britannica. Other honors of various 
sorts were showered on him and his fame reached the pro- 
portions of Byron's, but his health began to fail and he did 
not live long enough to experience any reaction. He died of 
heart trouble on December 28, 1859, in the fulness of his 
intellectual powers, and leaving his great history incomplete. 

The chief reasons for Macaulay's tremendous popularity 
are not far to seek. He possessed a style which whether 
metallic, as has been claimed, or not, is at all times clear 
and strenuous. He simply commanded attention by his 
positive assurance of statement, and, when once he had ob- 
tained it, took care not to lose it through any obscurity. 
Rather than indulge in qualifications that might embarrass 
the reader, he chose, it may be unconsciously, to state half 
truths as whole truths, and to play the advocate while posing 
as the critic. The world has always loved the man who 
knows his own mind, and Macaulay knew his and pro- 
claimed the fact loudly. Then again the world has always 
loved the strong man who is not too far aloof from it to 



Al-ii .i 



holvi many of its prejodiess and opiuioiis* Tliis irsi5 justl 
the ca.<c> iriih Macmlay* wlm was Ht^ more than a middle- 
class Bi^tshmaii TTuh T:%$tlj magiiified powers. Sabilety 
of intelket and delieaev of taslft w»e as far from him asj 
lliey have always been from a majcunty of his countrymen,} 
bat dtigmatM assuranee ;»iul o(>tiiiiistie coafideaee in what*! 
eT«r was Ei^lish were his in full iiiea»aa<e^ Tlie Tery qnali-j 
lies tiiat made Tonny^m for a long time ecli]^e Broi 
made Maeaoby ecli^^se Carlyle. and in both eases a nat>f 
and reactioii s^t in. Critics calleii attention to tlie artifi- 
dal balanea of Macaaby's $entenee$, and to the brazen ring 
of bis T»ses ; tbej iwinted oat his blindness to nmoh that 
k ^igbest and purest in litemtui* ; they couvioted him of 
patikansliip and made slK>rt work of his assomptions of 
omnistaeneew In all this they had considerable tnith oni 
tlieir sido> bat as was natoial they went to extremos, and 
tlie pendahim of opinioa is now swinging in MaeaoUy's 
direction aptin. Mr. Matthew Arnold was right wbm he 
insisted on Macaulay's middle-^Jass limitatioDs. but he went 
too far wben he practically denied that Maeaulay had any 
daim to tiie tide of po^ Schoolboys and older readers 
hare not be«i entirdr ddoded wk»i they hare bem car- 
ried away by the swing of Irry and of Horatins, Tke 
essay on Mihoa has done good to dioasands of readers, 
tlio«^ its critical ^ahie is si^it in tiie extreme. Tbe third 
diapter of the Hhtcrif, describing the England of 1685. 
lemains one of the most brilliant pieces of historical narra- 
tion eTCf p»med. no matter how partisan Macanlay maj 
hare be«ft in tiie ranaindei- of the work. Howerer much 
his assoB^tioiis of onad sci eac e may Tex us. we must per- 
foroe admit that no modern specialist has ever known his 
pecoBar sabjeet bellH> than Macanlay knew his chosen 
p»iod of histoiT, the r^ns of James II. and William III. 
Tlieoriae as much as we wiQ aboot the pellacid beauties of 
an an^aboiated s^le« we most eonfess diat if the object of 
writiBf be to roadi and infloeDea mm, Maeanlay's bakneed. 



INTRODUCTION. vii 

antithetical style is one of the most perfect instruments of 
expression ever made use of by speaker or writer. We 
may complain that Macaulay often leaves liis subject and 
wanders off into space, but we have to confess with Mr. 
Hau.tsbury that he is one of the greatest stimulators of 
Dther minds that ever lived. In short we must conclude 
that although the brilliant historian and essayist has no 
such claim to our veneration as a great poet like Words- 
worth, or a great novelist like Scott, or a great prophet like 
Carlyle, nevertheless his place is with the honored names of 
literature, and his fame is no proper subject for carping 
and ungenerous crit:"i«m. 

With regard now to his individual works the highest 
praise must of course be given to his History. In spite of 
its incompleteness and its partisan character it is plainly one 
of the most notable of the world's historical compositions. 
It yields to the great work of Gibbon, but it would be hard 
to name any other history in English that is its superior in 
what is after all the essential point, the art of narration. 
Macaulay claimed that his favorite Addison might have 
written a great novel, but the claim might better be made 
for Macaulay himself, since he was a born story teller. 
Unkind critics have intimated that he drew upon his imagi- 
nation for his characters, and the public has always con- 
fessed that the History is as interesting as a novel. We 
shall not, however, go so far as to maintain that the His- 
tory is a novel or that Lord Macaulay was a great novelist 
spoiled ; but we are at liberty to contend that the great 
secret of the historian's success lay in his comprehension of 
the fact that to make the past really live it must be treated 
in much the same way in which a novelist would treat the 
materials gathered for his story. 

Perhaps enough has been said about our author's scanty 
poetry, which appeals chiefly through its swing and vigor, 
but the Essays will naturally demand somewhat fuller 
treatment. Their main value lies probably in the stimula- 
tion they give to the intellectual powers of any reader who 



viii MACAULAY. 

has a spark of literary appreciation or the slightest desire 
to learn. Macaulay's erudition is so great and he wears it 
so lightly that one is instinctively led to wish for a similai j 
mental equipment, and to fancy that it cannot be very diffi-J 
cult of attainment. Whatever Macaulay likes is described | 
in such alluring terms that a reader feels that it would J 
really be too bad for him not to know more about it. TheJ 
truth of this statement is amusingly illustrated by an anec4 
dote, given in the Life and Letters, of a gentleman whcf 
after reading the review of Bunyan's FilgrhrCs Progres^\ 
sent a servant after the book. Macaulay was sitting near! 
him in the library of the Athenaeum Club and enjoyed the j 
incident. But, besides their alluring style and their power'i 
of mental stimulation, the Essays have the advantage ofj 
treating in the main great subjects that people wish to know| 
about, and treating them in such a way as to impart a large 
amount of compact and very useful information. Perhaps 
this is the chief reason why men who are self-educated are i 
so familiar with Macaulay. Such readers care very little 
for the nicer shadings of criticism, but they do care a great 
deal to have available information and positive opinions 
furnished them on the great men and events of the past. 
Hence Macaulay's essay on Bacon will survive the monu- 
mental answer that Mr. Spedding gave it ; hence his essays 
on Clive and Warren Hastings will for generations supply 
the public with all the Indian history it is likely to demand. 
After the Milton Macaulay wrote about forty essays, all 
of which appeared in the Edinburgh except the five con- 
tributed to the Encyclopoedia Britannica. They fall into 
two main classes, literary and historical, with a few of 
miscellaneous character, such as that on Sadler's Law of 
Population. It is a striking proof of Macaulay's genius 
that they are nearly all as well worth reading to-day as 
they were when they appeared between the yellow and blue 
covers. As a rule a review is unreadable a few years after 
its appearance, as is proved by the dust that settles upon 
the volumes of such contemporaries of Macaulay's as Mack- 



INTRODUCTION. ix 

intosh and Talfourd. Their reviews were duly collected 
into volumes and they were included with Macaulay among 
the " Britisn Essayists," but they are dead while Macaulay 
lives. The quarterlies are still published, and their pon- 
jvderous reviews are read by leisurely people, and immedi- 
*ately forgotten, for there is no form of literature that has 
less vitality. Yet Macaulay's reviews are still read by thou- 
sands and keep alive the names of books and men that 
would else have long since perished. It is a remarkable 
literary phenomenon. While Macaulay did not originate 
the discursive literary re, law, he first gave it life and popu- 
larity, and may be compared to a trunk that puts forth 
many branches. But the branches are all dead or dying, 
while the trunk seems to be endowed with perpetual life 
and vigor. Explain it as we may, the fact remains that 
the essays on Clive and Pitt and Warren Hastings, on Mil- 
ton and Addison and Johnson, on Barere and Mr. Robert 
Montgomery's Poems, although belonging by nature to the 
most ephemeral category of literature, are as fully entitled 
to be called classics as any compositions written in the Eng- 
lish language during the present century. 

Four of the best of these classical essays form the basis 
of this collection, and a careful study of them with the aid 
of the introductions and notes will initiate the student into 
much of the secret of Macaulay's power and charm. He 
should not, however, rest content with them, but should 
read at least most of the Essays and the poems, and should 
then go on to complete the five volumes of the History. 
Even then he will not have all of Macaulay, for the two 
delightful volumes of the Life and Letters, edited by Mr. 
Trevelyan, will remain to be enjoyed. Mr. Cotter Mori- 
son's excellent biography in the English Men of Letters 
will also be found worth perusing, and if a good analysis of 
the style of the great essayist be wanted, it can be had in a 
chapter of Professor Minto's well known Manual of Eng- 
lish Prose Literature. 



^' PREFATORY NOTE. 

The essay on Milton appeared in August, 1825, in the great 
Whig organ. The Edinburgh Review, and was nominally a review 
of Charles R. Sumner's translation of Milton's tract on Christian 
Doctrine. The Edinburgh, established in 1802, was at that time 
almost as old as the new contributor who was destined to out- 
shine its censorious editor Francis Jeffrey, and its witty co- 
founder Sydney Smith. Macaulay had previously furnished a 
few articles to Knight'' s Quarterly, but he was practically an 
unknown writer when he launched forth the political pamphlet 
— it was little more — that was to make him famous. Its effect 
was instantaneous. Social invitations of all sorts littered his 
table. Jeffrey wrote wondering where he " picked that style 
up," and the great preacher, Robert Hall, who was near his end, 
was discovered lying on his floor trying, by means of grammar 
and dictionary, to work out in the original Italian the parallel 
between Dante and Milton, — an incident all the more pathetic, 
as Arnold has remarked, from the fact that he could not have 
accomplished his purpose had he been in full health and master 
of the language. But the readers of 1825 were not very criti- 
cal, and they swallowed the parallel and flattered Macaulay in a 
way that would be possible now only in the case of the anther of 
the latest dialect story. Yet the public, after all, knew what 
it was about, and the qualities that made the essay famous sev- 
enty years ago keep it famous to-day. These qualities have 
nothing to do with criticism, for as criticism Macaulay's perform- 
ance is crude in the extreme. He recognized this fact himself 
twenty years later, and condemned his own youthful extravagance 
of matter and style, but Matthew Arnold went further and prac- 
tically denied that the brilliant rhetorician had the true qualities 
of a critic at all. However extravagant this claim may seen), 
it is more than half true at all times and is abundantly true of 
the essay on Milton, which as criticism is not merely crude and 
extravagant, but unsound. Its treatment of Milton's poetry, for 
example, is lacking in proportion, in subtlety of penetration, and 



2 MACAULAY. 

even in intelleetnal veracity. Macaulay's pen simply slippj ^^ 
from his control at times, as when he wrote tlie absurd sentei^ ^ 
about Milton's conception of love uniting " all the voluptuoi '.' 
ness of the Oriental harem" with "all the pure and quiet affe \ 
tion of an English fireside." Even the readers of 1825 mu ( 
have rubbed their eyes at this statement. 

But at no time has the essay on Milton been compelled to star 
on its merits as criticism. It has had nothing to do but sta^ 
on its merits as a piece of special pleading. And where can or 
find a more enthusiastic and inspiring rhetorical appeal for ' ' 
favorable verdict in behalf of a man on trial for his reputation! ' 
Milton was on trial in 1825, for Johnson's biased Life still re 
tained an authority it had never deserved, and there were sti 
people in England who prayed for the Royal Martyr. He is o 
trial still with those narrow-minded persons who cannot forgc| 
that he was a Puritan. To all such people, Macaulay, througl 
his so-called essay, makes a forensic address, which for its powei 
of suspending the judgment and exciting the imagination has 
seldom been paralleled in the history of literature. Had Milton 
and Macaulay been contemporaries and had the former been on 
trial for his life, the latter could have delivered the essay as a 
speech to the jury, and then published it for literary purposes 
with hardly greater changes than Cicero made in his oration for 
Archias. It was, then, a rhetorical appeal that took captive the 
readers of two generations ago, and it is a rhetorical appeal that 
captivates us all, old and young, to-day. 

Now it is a most excellent thing to be captivated by an appeal 
thafis made in favor of John Milton, No other writer or char- 
acter in English history will so well repay study unless it be 
Shakespeare, and him we can study only in his works. But for 
perfection of artistic workmanship and for loftiness of purpose, 
for political wisdom and for private virtue, Milton surpasses 
even Shakespeare himself, and so as a man and a writer is 
worthy of our eternal regard and reverent contemplation. The 
materials for the study of his life are full, and when they are 
mastered the petty fault-findings of captious critics seem to be 
of as little consequence as the spots on the sun are to the naked 
eye. The better this noble and heroic man is known, the more 
he will be loved and honored, and if Macaulay's essay arouse in 
any reader a desire to know him (as it surely should), then the 
day of its perusal will be a marked one in that reader's intellec- 



PREFATORY NOTE. 3 

'al life. And from the essay he can go on to the great Life of 

ilton by Professor Masson, and to the truly adnnrable biogra- 

jiies by Mark Pattison (in the English Men of Letters) and by 

ir. Richard Garnet t (in the Great Writers), until, at last, steeped 

' knowledge of his subject and glowing with enthusiasm, he 

comes what every man should wish to be — a true Miltonian. 

following the interesting leads which this essay opens, the 

feder will do well to consult Macaulay's History of England 

'nif V Green's Short History of the English People, Saintsbury's 

iT ^ory of Elizabethan Literature, Edmund Gosse's History of 

j]j -^kteenth Century I^iterature, Ward's English Poets, and Ma- 

;i ay's History of Classical Greek Literature. 

s 
, f 



acoi 
fin 



MILTON. ,i 



Towards the close of the year 1823, Mr. Lemonl',^ 
deputy keeper of the state papers, in the course oVif 
his researches among the presses of his office me^t ' 
with a large Latin manuscript. With it were founc*! 
corrected copies of the foreign dispatches written biy 
Milton while he filled the office of secretary, ^ anci \ 
several papers relating to the Popish Trials and ther; 
Rye House Plot.^ The whole was wrapped up in an en-l 
velope, superscribed, "To Mr. Skinner, Merchant."^' 

1 Robert Lemon (1800-1867) made other important discov- 
eries, and did much to improve the methods of keeping public 
documents in England. 

2 Milton was made Latin secretary, or rather secretary for 
foreign tongues, in 1649, and held the office for ten years. He 
was not a mere copyist, but drafted state papers, and was em- 
ployed to defend the Commonwealth against its critics. It was 
his labor over his reply to Salmasius (see page 64, note 2) that 
cost him his eyesight. 

^ The Popish Trials followed the absurd charges of Titus 
Oates that there was a Roman Catholic plot to overthrow Prot- 
estantism and murder Chai-les II. (1678-79). The Rye House 
Plot was an actual conspiracy to murder Charles and his brother 
James, formed by some of the baser Whigs (1683). 

^ This was Daniel Skinner, nephew of that Cyriac Skinner to 
whom Milton addressed his twenty-first and twenty-second son- 
nets. The year after Milton's death (1675) the younger Skin- 
ner tried to have the Treatise on Christian Doctrine and the 
foreign dispatches published in Holland, England not being a 



MILTON. 5 

On examination the large manuscript proved to be 
the long-lost essay on the Doctrines of Christianity, 
which, according to Wood and Toland,i Milton fin- 
i':;hed after the Restoration, and deposited with Cyriac 
fkinner. Skinner, it is well known, held the same 
political opinions with his illustrious friend. It is 
therefore probable, as Mr. Lemon conjectures, that 
he may have fallen under the suspicions of the gov- 
ernment during tlikt persecution of the Whigs which 
followed the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament ; ^ 
and that, in consequence of a general seizure of his 
papers, this work may have been brought to the 
office in which it has been found. But whatever 
the adventures of the manuscript may have been, no 
doubt can exist that it is a genuine relic of the great 
poet. 

Mr. Sumner,^ who was commanded by his Majesty 
to edit and translate the treatise, has acquitted him- 
self of his task in a manner honorable to his talents 
and to his character. His version is not, indeed, 

likely place then for such an undertakmg. Owing to various 
complications, Daniel Elzevir, the printer, delivered the manu- 
scripts to the English authorities, who pigeon-holed them. 

^ Anthony k Wood (1632-1695), the Oxford antiquarian, gave 
a sketch of Milton (who though a graduate of Camhridge was 
admitted to the M. A. of Oxford) in his Athence Oxonienses. 
John Toland (1670-1722), the well-known deistical writer, pub- 
lished a life of Milton in 1699. 

2 Parliament met at Oxford in March, 1681, in order that the 
Commons might not be influenced by the citizens of London. 
The bill for excluding James II. from the succession was then 
being pressed by the Whigs. The student should look up in 
some good dictionary the origin of the terms " Whig " and 
"Tory" (loosely speaking. Liberal and Conservative). 

^ The favorite chaplain of George IV. (who paid the expenses 
of the edition), and afterwards Bishop of Winchester. 



6 MAC A UL AY. 

very easy or elegant; but it is entitled to the praisj 
of clearness and fidelity. His notes abound wit 
interesting quotations, and have the rare merit c 
really elucidating the text. The preface is evidentl | 
the work of a sensible and candid man, firm in h: 
own religious opinions, and tolerant towards those c 
others. 

The book itself will not add much to the fame c f 
Milton. It is, like all his Latin works, well writteii , 
though not exactly in the style of the prize essays o^ 
Oxford and Cambridge. There is no elaborate imi-^ 
tation of classical antiquity, no scrupulous purity, 
none of the ceremonial cleanness which characterizes 
the diction of our academical Pharisees.^ The author 
does not attempt to polish and brighten his composi 
tion into the Ciceronian gloss and brilliancy. He 
does not, in short, sacrifice sense and spirit to pedan- 
tic refinements. The nature of his subject compelled 
him to use many words 

" That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp." ^ 

But he writes with as much ease and freedom as if 
Latin were his mother tongue ; and, where he is least 
happy, his failure seems to arise from the carelessness 
of a native, not from the ignorance of a foreigner. 
We may apply to him what Denham ^ with great feli- 

1 Macaulay means to imply that modern scholars in writing 
Latin pay more attention, like the Pharisees, to the external 
graces of style than to inward soundness of matter. 

2 From Milton's eleventh sonnet. Marcus Fabius Quintilianus 
(cii'ca 36-96 A. D.) was a famous Roman critic and teacher of 
rhetoric. 

3 Sir John Denham (1615-1668) and Abraham Cowley (1618- 
1667), both noted poets once, and precursors of the formal school 
of Dryden and Pope. Some of Cowley's poems and his Essays 
ought to be read, as well as Macaulay's Conversation between Mr. 



MILTON. 7 

cfty says of Cowley. He wears the garb, but not the 
clothes, of the ancients. 

Throughout the volume are discernible the traces 
of a powerful and independent mind, emancipated 
from the influence of authority, and devoted to the 
search of truth. Milton professes to form his system 
from the Bible alone; and his digest of scriptural 
/^xts is certainly among the best that have appeared, 
^ut he is not always so happy in his inferences as in 
his citations. 

Some of the heterodox doctrines which he avows 
seem to have excited considerable amazement, particu- 
larly his Arianism, and his theory on the subject of 
polygamy. Yet we can scarcety conceive that any 
l)erson could have read the "Paradise Lost" without 
suspecting him of the former; nor do we think that 
an}^ reader, acquainted with the history of his life, 
ought to be much startled at the latter. The opinions 
which he has expressed respecting the nature of the 
Deity, the eternity of matter, and the observation of 
the Sabbath, might, we think, have caused more just 
surprise.^ 

But we will not go into the discussion of these 
points. The book, were it far more orthodox or far 

Abraham Cowley and Mr. John Milton, touching the Great Civil 
War. The lines referred to occur in Denham's Elegy on Cow- 
ley, and are as follows : — 

" Horace's wit and Virgil's state 
He did not steal, but emulate, 
And when he would like them appear, 
Their garb, but not their clothes, did wear." 

^ For a fuller description of Milton's treatise, see Garnett's 
Milton, pp. 191-193. Milton did not exactly share the notions 
of Arius as to the nature of Christ, but was rather a semi-Arian. 
He tolerated polygamy on the ground that the Bible did not 
expressly prohibit it. 



8 MACAU LAY. 

more heretical than it is, would not much edify d^t 
corrupt the present generation. The men of our time 
are not to be converted or perverted by quartos. A 
few more days and this essay will follow the "Defen- 
sio Populi " 1 to the dust and silence of the up]3ejr 
shelf. The name of its author, and the remarkable 
circumstances attending its publication, will secure lio 
it a certain degree of attention. For a month or twjo 
it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing^, 
room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it*" 
will then, to borrow the elegant language of the jjlay- 
bills, be withdrawn to make room for the forthcoming 
novelties. 

We wish, however, to avail ourselves of the inter- 
est, transient as it may be, which this work has ex- 
cited. The dexterous Capuchins^ never choose to 
preach on the life and miracles of a saint till they 
have awakened the devotional feelings of their audi- 
tors by exhibiting some relic of him, — a thread of 
his garment, a lock of his hair, or a drop of his 
blood. On the same principle, we intend to take 
advantage of the late interesting discovery, and, 
while this memorial of a great and good man is still 
in the hands of all, to say something of his moral and 
intellectual qualities. Nor, we are convinced, will 
the severest of our readers blame us if, on an occa- 
sion like the present, we turn for a short time from 
the topics of the day to commemorate, in all love 
and reverence, the genius and virtues of John Milton, 

^ The Latin treatise in defense of the people of England 
against the criticisms of Salmasius. See page 64, note 2. 

2 The Capnchins are a branch of the Franciscan monks, 
founded in 1528, and so named from the long pointed capouch 
or cowl they wear. 



MILTON. 9 

the poet, the sta esman, the philosopher, the glory of 
English literatu^ 3, the champion and the martyr of 
English liberty. 

'^^It is by his j,'oetry that Milton is best known, and 
it is of his poetry that we wish first to speak. By 
the general suffrage of the civilized world, his place 
has been assigned among the greatest masters of the 
art. His detractors, however, though outvoted, have 
not been silenced. There are many critics, and some 
of great name, who contrive in the same breath to 
extol the poems and to decry the poet. The works 
they acknowledge, considered in themselves, may be 
classed among the noblest productions of the human 
mind. But they will not allow the author to rank 
with those great men who, born in the infancy of 
civilization, supplied by their own powers the want 
of instruction ; and, though destitute of models them- 
selves, bequeathed to posterity models which defy 
imitation. Milton, it is said, inherited what his pre- 
decessors created : he lived in an enlightened age ; he 
received a finished education ; and we must, therefore, 
if we would form a just estimate of his po\yers, make 
large deductions in consideration of these advantages. 
We venture to say, on the contrary, paradoxical as 
the remark may appear, that no poet has ever had 
to strugraie with more unfavorable circumstances 
than Milton. He doubted, as he has himself owned, 
whether he had not been born "an age too late."^ 
For this notion Johnson has thought fit to make him 
the butt of much clumsy ridicule. ^ The poet, we 
believe, understood the nature of his art better than 

^ See Paradise Lost, ix. 44. 

2 See Johnson's Life of Milton, near the middle. Macaulay's 
remark is hardly just to Johnson. 



10 MACAULAY. 

the critic. He knew that his poetical genius derived 
no advantage from the civilization which surrounded 
him, or from the learning which he had acquired; 
and he looked back with something like regret to the 
ruder age of simple words and vivid impressions. 

We think that, as civilization advances, poetry 
almost necessarily declines. Therefore, though we 
fervently admire those great works of imagination 
which have appeared in dark ages, we do not admire 
them the more because they have appeared in dark 
ages. On the contrary, we hold that the most won- 
derful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem 
produced in a civilized age. We cannot understand 
why those who believe in that most orthodox article 
of literary faith, that the earliest poets are generally 
the best, should wonder at the rule as if it were the 
exception. Surely, the uniformity of the phenomenon 
indicates a corresponding uniformity in the cause. ^ 

The fact is, that common observers reason from 
the progress of the experimental sciences to that of 
the imitative arts. The improvement of the former 
is gradual and slow. Ages are spent in collecting 
materials, ages more in separating and combining 
them. Even when a system has been formed, there 
is still something to add, to alter, or to reject. Every 
generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed 
to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, aug- 
mented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages. In 
these pursuits, therefore, the first speculators lie under 
great disadvantages, and, even when they fail, are 

1 Macaulay here and elsewhere in this essay is merely ex- 
panding ideas that he had previously expressed in his article on 
Dante. There is some truth in his views, but many of his state- 
ments must not be accepted unreservedly. 



MILTON. 11 

entitled to praise. Their pupils, with far inferior 
intellectual powers, speedily surpass them in actual 
attainments. Every girl who has read Mrs. Marcet's ^ 
little dialogues ofi political economy could teach Mon- 
tague ^ or Walpole^ many lessons in finance. Any 
intelligent man may now, by resolutely applying him- 
self for a few years to mathematics, learn more than 
the great Newton knew after half a century of study 
and meditation. 

But it is not thus with music, with painting, or 
with sculpture. Still less is it thus with poetry. 
The progress of refinement rarely supplies these arts 
with better objects of imitation. It may indeed 
improve the instruments which are necessary to the 
mechanical operations of the musician, the sculptor, 
and the painter. But language, the machine of the 
poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. 
Nations, like individuals, first perceive and then ab- 
stract. They advance from particular images to gen- 
eral terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened 
society is philosophical; that of a half -civilized peo- 
ple is poetical.* 

1 Mrs. Jane Marcet (1769-1858) wrote a text-Look for chil- 
dren, sufficiently described in the text. Political Economy was 
a favorite science in the early part of the century, and a more 
celebrated woman, Harriet Martineau, made it the basis for a 
series of tales. 

2 Charles Montague (1661-1715), afterwards Earl of Halifax, 
the famous chancellor of the exchequer under William III., and 
founder of the Bank of England. He was a patron of literary 
men (see the essay on Addison, page 110), and a small poet 
himself. He is frequently referred to in Macaulay's History. 

^ The great Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745), George II.'s 
chief minister. 

^ Note the effect of the short sentences. The very rapidity of 
the argument helps to carry conviction. 



12 MACAULAY. 

This change in the language of men is partly the 
cause and partly the effect of a corresponding change 
in the nature of their intellectual operations, — of 
a change by which science gains and poetry loses. 
Generalization is necessary to the advancement of 
knowledge, but particularity is indispensable to the 
creations of the imagination. In proportion as men 
know more and think more, they look less at indi- 
viduals and more at classes. The}^ therefore make 
better theories and worse poems. They give us vague 
phrases instead of images, and personified qualities 
instead of men. They may be better able to analyze 
human nature than their predecessors. But analy- 
sis is not the business of the poet. His office is to 
portray, not to dissect. He may believe in a moral 
sense, like Shaftesbury ; ^ he may refer all human 
actions to self-interest, like Helvetius;^ or he may 
never think about the matter at all. His creed on 
such subjects will no more influence his poetry, proj)- 
erly so called, than the notions which a painter may 
have conceived respecting the lachrymal glands, or 
the circulation of the blood, will affect the tears of 
his Niobe ^ or the blushes of his Aurora. If Shake- 
speare had written a book on the motives of human 
actions, it is by no means certain that it would have 

1 Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671-1713), third Earl of Shaftes- 
bury, is distinguished among his famous kinsmen for his Char- 
acteristics, once a very popular book. He ranks high as a stylist, 
but as a moral philosopher suffers from the neglect that attends 
most of the deistic writers of the period. 

2 Claude Helv^tius (1715-1771), a popular French philosopher. 
^ For the famous story of Niobe, who wept herself into stone 

when her children were slain by Apollo and Diana, see a classi- 
cal dictionary. Consult the same for legends concerning Aurora, 
the goddess of the dawn. 



MILTON. 13 

been a good one. It is extremely improbable that 
it would have contained half so much able reasoning 
on the subject as is to be found in "The Fable of 
the Bees." But (fould Mandeville ^ have created an 
lago ? - Well as he knew how to resolve characters 
into their elements, would he have been able to com- 
bine those elements in such a manner as to make up 
a man, — a real, living, individual man ? 

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even en- 
joy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind, 
if anything which gives so much pleasure ought to 
be called unsoundness. By poetry we mean not all 
writing in verse, nor even all good writing in verse. 
Our definition excludes many metrical compositions 
which, on other grounds, deserve the highest praise. 
By. poetry we mean the art of employing words in 
such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagi- 
nation, the art of doing by means of words what the 
painter does by means of colors. Thus the greatest 
of poets has described it, in lines universally admired 
for the vigor and felicity of their diction, and still 
more valuable on account of the just notion which 
they convey of the art in which he excelled : — - 

" As imagination bodies forth 
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name." ^ 

These are the fruits of the "fine frenzy" which he 

1 Bernard de Mandeville (1670-1733), a satirist whose chief 
work— partly prose, partly verse — is named in the text. Its 
purpose is to show that luxury of any sort helps the laboring 
classes. Browning has resurrected Mandeville in his Parleijings. 

2 See Shakespeare's Othello. 

^ Midsummer NighVs Dream, V. i. 14-17. 



14 MA CAUL AY. 

ascribes to the poet, — a fine frenzy, doubtless, but 
still a frenzy. Truth, indeed, is essential to poetry ; 
but it is the truth of madness. The reasonings are 
just, but the premises are false. After the first sup- 
positions have been made, everything ought to be 
consistent; but those first suppositions require a de- 
gree of credulity which almost amounts to a partial 
and temporary derangement of the intellect. Hence, 
of all peojile, children are the most imaginative. They 
abandon themselves without reserve to every illusion. 
Every image which is strongly presented to their 
mental eye produces on them the effect of reality. 
No man, whatever his sensibility may be, is ever 
affected by Hamlet or Lear as a little girl is affected 
by the story of poor Red Riding Hood. She knows 
that it is all false, that wolves cannot speak, that 
there are no wolves in England. Yet in sj^ite of her 
knowledge she believes; she weeps; she trembles; 
she dares not go into a dark room lest she should 
feel the teeth of the monster at her throat. Such 
is the despotism of the imagination over uncultivated 
minds. 

In a rude state of society, men are children with a 
greater variety of ideas. It is therefore in such a 
state of society that we may expect to find the poeti- 
cal temperament in its highest perfection. In an 
enlightened age there will be much intelligence, much 
science, much 2:>hilosophy, abundance of just classifi- 
cation and subtle analysis, abundance of wit and elo- 
quence, abundance of verses, and even of good ones; 
but little poetry. Men will judge and compare, but they 
will not create. They will talk about the old poets, 
and comment on them, and to a certain degree enjoy 
them. But they will scarcely be able to conceive the 



MILTON. 15 

effect which poetry produced on their ruder ancestors, 
— the agony, the ecstasy, the plenitude of belief. The 
Greek Rhapsodists,^ according- to Plato, could scarce 
recite Homer wiliiout falling into convulsions. The 
Mohawk hardly feels the scalping - knife while he 
shouts his death song. The power which the ancient 
bards of Wales and Germany exercised over their 
auditors seems to modern readers almost miraculous. 
Such feelings are very rare in a civilized community, 
and most rare among those who participate most in 
its improvements. They linger longest among the 
peasantry. 

Poetry produces an illusion on the eye of the mind, 
as a magic lantern produces an illusion on the eye of 
the body. And, as the magic lantern acts best in 
a dark room, poetry effects its purpose most com- 
pletely in a dark age. As the light of knowledge 
breaks in upon its exhibitions, as the outlines of cer- 
tainty become more and more definite, and the shades 
of probability more and more distinct, the hues and 
lineaments of the phantoms which the poet calls up 
grow fainter and fainter. We cannot unite the in- 
compatible advantages of reality and deception, the 
clear discernment of truth, and the exquisite enjoy- 
ment of fiction. 2 

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, 
aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little 
child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his 
mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge 

1 The rhapsodists were professional reciters of poems. The 
special reference is to Plato's Ion, which should be read entire in 
Jowett's translation. 

2 This paragraph illustrates well Macanlay's power of pre- 
senting his readers with apt and elaborated illustrations. 



16 MACAULAY. 

which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title 
to superiority. His very talents will be a hindrance 
to him. His difficulties will be proportioned to his 
proficiency in the pursuits which are fashionable 
among his contemporaries; and that proficiency will 
in general be proportioned to the vigor and activity 
of his mind. And it is well if, after all his sacrifices 
and exertions, his works do not resemble a lisping 
man or a modern ruin. We have seen in our own 
time great talents, intense labor, and long medita- 
tion employed in this struggle against the spirit of 
the age, and employed, we will not say absolutely in 
vain, but with dubious success and feeble applause.^ 

If these reasonings be just, no poet has ever tri- 
umphed over greater difficulties than Milton. He 
received a learned education ; he was a profound and 
elegant classical scholar; he had, studied all the mys- 
teries of Rabbinical literature;^ he was intimately 
acquainted with every language of modern Europe 
from which either pleasure or information was then 
to be derived. He was perhaps the only great poet 
of later times who has been distinguished by the 
excellence of his Latin verse. The genius of Pe- 
trarch 2 was scarcely of the first order ; and his poems 
in the ancient language, though much praised by 
those who have never read them, are wretched com- 

1 The allusion is probably to Wordsworth. 

'^ The term "Rabbinical literature" applies to the body of 
writings explanatory of the Scriptures composed by learned rab- 
bis since the Christian era. 

3 For Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), who is chiefly known for 
his Italian sonnets and his love for Laura, but who also wrote 
much Latin verse, and was a leader in the Revival of Learning, 
see Hallam's Literature of Europe. Macaulay had criticised 
Petrarch much too harshly in Knight's Quarterly in 1824. 



MILTON. 17 

positions. Cowley, i with all his admirable wit and 
ingenuity, had little imagination; nor indeed do we 
think his classical diction comparable to that of Mil- 
ton. The authority of Johnson is against us on this 
point. But Johnson had studied the bad writers of 
the Middle Ages till he had become utterly insensible 
to the Augustan elegance,^ and was as ill qualified to 
judge between two Latin styles as a habitual drunk- 
ard to set up for a wine-taster. 

Versification in a dead language is an exotic, a far- 
fetched, costly, sickly imitation of that which else- 
where may be found in healtliful and spontaneous 
perfection. The soils on which this rarity flourishes 
are in general as ill suited to the production of vigor- 
ous native poetry as the flower-pots of a hot-house to 
the growth of oaks. That the author of the "Par- 
adise Lost " should have written the " Epistle to 
Manso " ^ was truly wonderful. Never before were 
such marked originality and such exquisite mimicry 
found together. Lideed, in all the Latin poems of 
Milton, the artificial manner indispensable to such 
works is admirably preserved, while, at the same 
time, his genius gives to them a peculiar charm, an 

1 Cowley (see page 6, note 3) wrote a good deal of Latin 
verse, including a long poem on plants. 

2 The age of the Emperor Augustus was marked by the flower- 
ing of Roman literary genius in Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, 
etc., most of whom described the glories and upheld the meas- 
ures of the reign. Hence any period similarly characterized is 
termed Augustan, — e. g., the reigns of Queen Anne and of 
Louis XIV. 

^ This was a graceful poem in Latin hexameters, addressed to 
the celebrated Marquis Manso (15G1-1645), the patron of Tasso 
and Marini, by Milton, who had been kindly received at Naples 
by the old nobleman. 



18 MACAULAY. 

air of nobleness and freedom, which distinguishes 
them from all other writings of the same class. They 
remind us of the amusements of those angelic warriors 
who composed the cohort of Gabriel : — 

" About him exercised heroic games 
The unarmed youth of heaven ; but nigh at hand 
Celestial armory, shields, helms, and spears, 
Hung high, with diamond flaming and with gold." ^ 

We cannot look upon the sj)ortive exercises for which 
the genius of Milton ungirds itself, without catching 
a glimpse of the gorgeous and terrible panoply which 
it is accustomed to wear. The sti;ength of his imagi- 
nation triumphed over every obstacle. So intense 
and ardent was the fire of his mind that it not only 
was not suffocated beneath the weight of fuel, but 
penetrated the whole superincumbent mass with its 
own heat and radiance. 

It is not our intention to attempt anything like a 
complete examination of the poetry of Milton. The 
public has long been agreed as to the merit of the 
most remarkable passages, the incomparable harmony 
of the numbers, and the excellence of that style which 
no rival has been able to equal and no parodist to 
degrade,^ which displays in their highest perfection 
the idiomatic powers of the English tongue, and to 
which every ancient and every modern language has 
contributed something of grace, of energy, or of music. 

^ Paradise Lost, iv. 551-554. 

2 Milton has been parodied, for example, by Pope in The Rape 
of the Lock, by John Philips in The Splendid Shilling, and by- 
Isaac Hawkins Brown in A Pipe of Tobacco. Perhaps the most 
absurd attempt to imitate him is William Mason's elegy on 
Pope, entitled Musceus, which was modeled on Lycidas. For 
English parody in general, see A. S. Martin's On Parody. 



MILTON. 19 

In the vast field of criticism on which we are entering, 
inmunerable reapers have already put their sickles. 
Yet the harvest is ?o abundant that the negligent 
search of a straggling gleaner may be rewarded with 
a sheaf. 

The most striking characteristic of the poetry of 
Milton is the extreme remoteness of the associations 
by means of which it acts on the reader. Its effect 
is produced, not so much by what it expresses, as by 
what it suggests; not so much by the ideas which 
it directly conveys, as by other ideas which are con- 
nected with them. He electrifies the mind throuoii 
conductors.^ The most unimaginative man must un- 
derstand the Iliad. Homer gives him no choice, and 
requires from him no exertion, but takes the whole 
upon himself, and sets the images in so clear a light 
that it is impossible to be blind to them. The works 
of Milton cannot be comprehended or enjoyed unless 
the mind of the reader co(3perate with that of the 
writer. He does not paint a finished picture, or play 
for a mere passive listener. He sketches, and leaves 
others to fill up the outline. He strikes the keynote, 
and expects his hearer to make out the melody. 

We often hear of the magical influence of poetry. 
The expression in general means nothing; but, ap- 
plied to the writings of Milton, it is most appropriate. 
His poetry acts like an incantation. Its merit lies 
less in its obvious meaning than in its occult power. 
There would seem, at first sight, to be no more in his 
words than in other words. But they are words of 
enchantment. No sooner are they pronounced than 
the past is present and the distant near. New forms 
of beauty start at once into existence, and all the 
^ Note the felicitous apphcation of the scientific terms. 



20 MACAULAY. 

burial - jilaces of the memory give up their dead. 
Change the structure of the sentence, substitute one 
synonym for another, and the whole effect is de- 
stroyed. The spell loses its power; and he who 
should then hope to conjure with it would find him- 
self as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, 
when he stood crying, "Open Wheat," "Open Bar- 
ley," to the door which obeyed no sound but "Open 
Sesame."^ The miserable failure of Dryden^ in his 
attempt to translate into his own diction some parts 
of the " Paradise Lost " is a remarkable instance of 
this. 

In support of these observations we may remark, 
that scarcely any passages in the poems of Milton are 
more generally known, or more frequently repeated, 
than those which are little more than muster-rolls 
of names. ^ They are not always more appropriate 
or more melodious than other names. But they are 
charmed names. Every one of them is the first link 
in a long chain of associated ideas. Like the dwell- 
ing-place of our infancy revisited in manhood, like 
the song of our country heard in a strange land, they 
produce upon us an effect wholly independent of their 
intrinsic value. One transports us back to a remote 
period of history. Another places us among the 

^ See the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, in the 
Arabia?! Nights^ Entertainments. 

2 This refers to Dryden's opera, The State of Innocence, based 
on Paradise Lost, with Milton's permission, it is said. Critics 
are agreed that the performance was unworthy of a poet who 
was to succeed Milton on the throne of English poetry, and to 
write the famous lines on him. See Ward's English Poets for 
these lines, and Macaulay's essay on Dryden, as well as the first 
chapter of Dr. Richard Garnett's The Age of Dryden. 

^ See, for example, Paradise Lost, i. 580-585. 



MILTON. 21 

novel scenes and manners of a distant region. A 
third evokes all the dear classical recollections of 
childhood, — the schoolroom, the dog-eared Virgil, 
the holiday, and the prize. A fourth brings before 
us the splendid phantoms of chivalrous romance, the 
trophied lists, the embroidered housings, the quaint 
devices, the haunted forests, the enchanted gardens, 
the achievements of enamored knights, and the smiles 
of rescued princesses. 

In none of the works of Milton is his peculiar 
manner more happily displayed than in the "Allegro" 
and the "Penseroso." It is impossible to conceive 
that the mechanism of language can be brought to 
a more exquisite degree of perfection. These poems 
differ from others as attar of roses differs from or- 
dinary rosewater, the close-packed essence from the 
thin, diluted mixture. They are, indeed, not so much 
poems as collections of hints, from each of which the 
reader is to make out a poem for himself. Every 
epithet is a text for a stanza.^ 

The "Comus" and the "Samson Agonistes " are 
works which, though of very different merit, offer 
some marked points of resemblance. Both are lyric 
poems in the form of plays. There are, perhaps, no 
two kinds of composition so essentially dissimilar as 
the drama and the ode. The business of the drama- 
tist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing 
appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts 

^ This bit of criticism is often quoted — generally as Macaiilay 
first wrote it — with canto in place of stanza. The paragraph is 
on the whole a little extravagant, as most critics of Milton would 
agree that in Lycidas he brought the mechanism of language 
" to a more exquisite degree of perfection ; " but it is impossible 
to find serious fault with praise of poems so admirable. 



22 MA CAUL AY. 

notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken. 
The effect is as unpleasant as that which is produced 
on the stage by the voice of a prompter or the en- 
trance of a scene - shifter. Hence it was that the 
tragedies of Byron were his least successful perform- 
ances. They resemble those pasteboard pictures in- 
vented by the friend of children, Mr. Newbery,^ in 
which a single movable head goes round twenty dif- 
ferent bodies, so that the same face looks out upon 
us, successively, from the uniform of a hussar, the 
furs of a judge, and the rags of a beggar. In all the 
characters, — patriots and tyrants, haters and lovers, 
— the frown and sneer of Harold^ were discernible 
in an instant. But this species of egotism, though 
fatal to the drama, is the insj^iration of the ode.^ It 
is the part of the lyric poet to abandon himself with- 
out reserve to his own devotions. 

Between these hostile elements man}^ great men 
have endeavored to effect an amalgamation, but never 
with complete success. The Greek drama, on the 
model of which the "Samson" was written, sprang 
from the ode. The dialogue was ingrafted on the 
chorus, and naturally partook of its character. The 
genius of the greatest of the Athenian dramatists co- 
operated with the circumstances under which tragedy 
made its first appearance, ^schylus was, head and 
heart, a lyric poet. In his time the Greeks had far 

^ John Newbery (1713-1767), a publisher of children's books 
in St. Paul's Churchyard. Goldsmith was one of his writers, and 
paid him a tribute in The Vicar of Wakefield. 

" The hero of Byron's Childe Harold'' s Pilgrimage. 

^ Macaulay seems to use " ode " in this paragraph as synon}^- 
mous with lyric poetry ; it is really the greatest form in which 
the lyrical or subjective impulse of the poet expresses itself, 
e. g., the Odes of Pindar, Wordsworth's Ode to Duty. 



y 



MILTON. 23 

more intercourse with the East than in the days of 
Homer; and they had not yet acquired that immense 
superiority in war, in science, and in the arts, which, 
in the following generation, led them to treat the 
Asiatics with contempt. From the narrative of He- 
rodotus it should seem that they still looked up, with 
the veneration of disciples, to Egypt and Assyria. 
At this period, accordingly, it was natural that the 
literature of Greece should be tinctured with the Ori- 
ental st3de. And that style, we think, is discernible 
in the works of Pindar ^ and ^schylus. The latter 
often reminds us of the Hebrew writers. The Book 
of Job, indeed, in conduct and diction, bears a con- 
siderable resemblance to some of his dramas.^ Con- 
sidered as plays, his works are absurd ; considered as 
choruses, they are above all praise. If, for instance, 
we examine the address of Clytemnestra to Agamem- 
non on his return,^ or the description of the seven Ar- 
give chiefs,^ by the principles of dramatic writing, we 
shall instantly condemn them as monstrous. But if 
we forget the characters, and think only of the poetry, 
we shall admit that it has never been surpassed in 
energy and magnificence. Sophocles made the Greek 
drama as dramatic as was consistent with its oi'iginal 
form. His portraits of men have a sort of similar- 
ity ; but it is the similarity, not of a painting, but of 

1 In connection with Pindar (522-443 b. c.) read Milton's 
eighth sonnet, and see Mahaffy. 

2 Job practically is a drama, and is so treated by modern 
scholars. See Moulton's edition in his Modern Reader's Bible. 

3 The reference is to ^schylus's greatest play, the Agamem- 
non. ' 

* See ^sehylus's Seven against Thebes, in which Thebes is be- 
sieged by seven champions from Argos (" Argive "). 



24 MACAULAY. 

a bas-relief.^ It suggests a resemblance, but it does 
not produce an illusion. Euripides attempted to carry 
the reform further. But it was a task far beyond 
his powers, perhaps beyond any powers. Instead of 
correcting what was bad, he destroyed what was excel- 
lent. He substituted crutches for stilts, bad sermons 
for good odes. 

Milton, it is well known, admired Euripides highly, 
— much more highly than, in our opinion, Euripides 
deserved. Indeed, the caresses which this partiality 
leads our countryman to bestow on "sad Electra's^ 
poet " sometimes remind us of the beautiful Queen 
of Fairyland kissing the long ears of Bottom.^ At 
all events, there can be no doubt that this venera- 
tion for the Athenian, whether just or not, was in- 
jurious to the '' Samson Agonistes." Had Milton 
taken ^schylus for his model, he would have given 
himself up to the lyric inspiration, and j^oured out 
profusely all the treasures of his mind, without be- 
stowing a thought on those dramatic proprieties 
which the nature of the work rendered it impossible 
to preserve. In the attempt to reconcile things in 
their own nature inconsistent, he has failed, as every 
one else must have failed. We cannot identify our- 
selves with the characters, as in a good play. We 
cannot identify ourselves with the poet, as in a good 
ode. The conflicting ingredients, like an acid and 
an alkali mixed, neutralize each other. We are by 

^ Admirers of Antigone will not relish this statement, which 
is extravagant. 

2 See Milton's eighth sonnet. Macaulay subsequently modi- 
fied his views as to Euripides, a poet whom Robert Browning 
has done much to make more popular. 

^ See Midsummer Night's Dream, IV. i. 



MILTON. 25 

no means insensible to the merits of this celebrated 
piece, to the severe dignity of the style, the graceful 
and pathetic solemnity of the opening speech, or the 
wild and barbaric ^ melody which gives so striking an 
effect to the choral passages. But we think it, we 
confess, the least successful effort of the genius of 
Milton. 

The "Comus" is framed on the model of the Ital- 
ian masque, 2 as the "Samson" is framed on the 
model of the Greek tragedy. It is certainly the 
noblest performance of the kind which exists in any 
Lmguage. It is as far superior to the "Faithful 
Shepherdess" as the "Faithful Shepherdess" is to 
the "Aminta" or the "Aminta" to the "Pastor 
Fido."^ It was well for Milton that he had here no 

^ This is an eighteenth century touch, which, following after 
the scientific comparison, produces an odd effect. Macaulaydoes 
slight justice to the Samson. 

2 The Masque (or Mask) was a hybrid dramatic performance 
originating in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. It com- 
bined features of the masquerade, the carnival pageant, and the 
drama, and was often a costly affair. Transplanted to England it 
flourished chiefly under James L, when the feature of good verse 
was added to it by Ben Jonson and others. From a literary 
point of view Milton's masque is confessedly the greatest extant. 
See J. A. Symonds's Shakespeare and his Predecessors. 

^ The three plays here mentioned are all of the pastoral kind, 
— i. €., the chief personages are shepherds and shepherdesses far 
more artificial than natural. The Faithful Shepherdess is by 
John Fletcher (1579-1625). whose famous partner, Beaumont, 
had no share in what must always be regarded as one of the 
treasures of English literature. The Aminta is by Tasso (1544- 
1595), who is more famous for his Jerusalem Delivered ; and the 
Pastor Fido {Faithful Shepherd) is by the little read Italian poet 
Guarini (1537-1612). It takes a careful perusal of the four 
pieces to enable a reader to appreciate the essential justice of 
Macaulay's criticism, though it may be remarked that the com- 



26 MACAULAY. 

Euripides to mislead him. He understood and loved 
the literature of modern Italy. But he did not feel 
for it the same veneration which he entertained for 
the remains of Athenian and Roman poetry, conse- 
crated by so many lofty and endearing recollections. 
The faults, moreover, of his Italian predecessors were 
of a kind to which his mind had a deadly antij^athy. 
He could stoop to a plain style, sometimes even to 
a bald style; but false brilliancy was his utter aver- 
sion. His Muse had no objection to a russet attire; 
but she turned with disgust from the finery of Guarini, 
as tawdry and as paltry as the rags of a chimney- 
sweeper on May Dslj.^ Whatever ornaments she 
wears are of massive gold, not only dazzling to the 
sight, but capable of standing the severest test of the 
crucible. 

Milton attended in the "Comus" to the distinction 
which he afterwards neglected in the "Samson." He 
made his masque what it ought to be, essentially 
lyrical, and dramatic only in semblance. He has not 
attempted a fruitless struggle against a defect inher- 
ent in the nature of that species of composition ; and 
he has therefore succeeded, wherever success was not 
impossible. The speeches must be read as majestic 
soliloquies ; and he who so reads them will be enrap- 
tured with their eloquence, their sublimity, and their 
music. The interruptions of the dialogue, however, 

plex plot of Guarini is better than the insipidity of Tasso, and 
that the latter and lyric part of Comus, which Macaulay espe- 
cially praises, would probably not have been written without 
Fletcher's inspiration. 

1 " They differ from them as a May-Day procession of chim- 
ney-sweepers differs from the Field of the Cloth of Gold." (Ma- 
caulay on Petrarch.) The first of May was a holiday for the 
chimney-sweeps. 



MILTON. 27 

impose a constraint upon the writer, and break the 
illusion of the reader. The finest passages are those 
which are lyric in form as well as in spirit. "I should 
much commend," said the excellent Sir Henry Wot- 
ton^ in a letter to Milton, "the tragical part, if the 
lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique^ 
delicacy in your songs and odes, whereunto, I must 
plainly confess to you, I have seen yet nothing par- 
allel in our language." The criticism was just. It 
is when Milton escapes from the shackles of the dia- 
logue, when he is discharged from the labor of unit- 
ing two incongruous styles, when he is at liberty to 
indulge his choral raptures without reserve, that he 
rises even above himself. Then, like his own Good 
Genius bursting from the earthly form and weeds ^ of 
Thyrsis,* he stands forth in celestial freedom and 
beauty; he seems to cry exultingiy, — 

" Now my task is smoothly done, 
I can fly, or I can run," ^ 

to skim the earth, to soar above the clouds, to bathe 
in the elysian dew of the rainbow, and to inhale the 
balmy smells of nard and cassia, which the musky 

1 Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639), the famous Provost of 
Eton, and a minor poet (see Ward's English Poets), wrote this 
letter to Milton before the appearance of the anonymous edition 
of Comus in 1637. 

2 The reference is to the Doric Greek of Sicily, in which the 
pastorals of Theocritus (third century b. c), the father of this 
species of poetry, were written. 

3 Weeds = garments. 

* Thyrsis (a favorite name for a shepherd in classical pastor- 
als) was the shepherd whose form the Attendant Spirit took in 
Comus. 

•5 Comus, 1012, 1013. 



28 MA CAUL AY. 

wings of the zephjT scatter through the cedared alleys 
of the Hesperides.^ 

There are several of the minor poems of Milton on 
which we wotdd willingly make a few remarks. Still 
more willingly wonld we enter into a detailed exami- 
nation of that admirable poem, the '"Paradise Re- 
gained/' which, strangely enough, is scarcely ever 
mentioned except as an instance of the Vjlindness of 
the parental affection which men of letters bear to- 
wards the offspring of their inteUects. That Milton 
was mistaken in preferring this work, excellent as it 
is, to the "'Paradise Lost," we readily admit. ^ But 
we are sure that the superiority of the "Paradise 
Lost" to the *• Paradise Regained" is not more de- 
cided than the superiority of the "Paradise Regained " 
to every poem which has since made its appearance. 
Our limits, however, prevent us from discussing the 
point at length. We hasten on to that extraordinary 
production which the general suffrage of critics has 
placed in the highest class of human compositions.'^ 

The only poem of modem times which can be com- 
pared with the "Paradise Lost " is the *" Divine Com- 
edy." The subject of Milton, in some poiuts, resem- 
bled that of Dante ; but he has treated it in a widely 
different manner. TTe cannot, we think, better illus- 
trate our opinion respecting our own great poet, than 

^ Macaalay is here taming part of the Epilogne of Cr/rwa 
into prose. In so doing he feels bound to avoid using Milton's 
rare but beaotif ol epithet " cedam." 

* It is doubtful whether ^Milton had this preference. See 
Masson's introduction to the poem in the Everslev edition. 

* Macaulaj omits all reference to Lycidag and to the Ode on 
the Natitrity. He must have appreciated them highly, but can 
hardly have felt the admiration for the former that is now felt 
by most critical lovers of poetry. 



MILT ox. 29 

by contrasting him with the father of Tuscan litera- 
ture. 

The poetry of Milton differs from that of Dante as 
the hierogh-phics of Egypt differed from the picture- 
writino; of Mexico.^ The ima5:es which Dante era- 
ploys speak for themselves ; they stand simply for 
what they are. Those of Milton have a significa- 
tion which is often discernible only to the initiated. 
Their value depends less on what they directly repre- 
sent than on what they remotely suggest. However 
strange, however grotesque, may be the appearance 
which Dante undertakes to describe, he never shrinks 
from describing it. He gives us the shape, the color, 
the sound, the smell, the taste; he counts the num- 
bers; he measures the size. His similes are the illus- 
trations of a traveler. Unlike those of other poets, 
and especially of ^lilton, they are introduced in a 
plain, business-like manner; not for the sake of any 
beaut}' in the objects from which they are drawn, not 
for the sake of any ornament which they may impart 
to the poem, but simply in order to make the mean- 
ing of the writer as clear to the reader as it is to 
himself. The ruins of the precipice which led from 
the sixth to the seventh circle of hell were like those 
of the rock which fell into the Adige ^ on the south of 
Trent. The cataract of Phlegethon -^ was like that of 

^ Macanlay means that ^lilton represents things symboli- 
cally, Dante directly, as though he were painting a picture of 
each object. 

2 The Adige is a large river traversing Northern Italy, 
Trent, the capital of the Italian Tyrol, is situated on its banks. 
See Inferr^o, xii. b. 

2 Phlegethon — the burning river — one of the streams of 
Hades. 



30 MAC A UL AY. 

Aqua Cheta at the monastery of St. Benedict.^ The 
place where the heretics were confined in burning 
tombs resembled the vast cemetery of Aries. ^ 

Now let us compare with the exact details of Dante 
the dim intimations of Milton. We will cite a few 
examples. The English poet has never thought of 
taking the measure of Satan. He gives us merely a 
vague idea of vast bulk. In one passage the fiend 
lies stretched out, huge in length, floating many a 
rood, equal in size to the earth-born enemies of Jove, 
or to the sea monster which the mariner mistakes for 
an island.^ When he addresses himself to battle 
against the guardian angels, he stands like Teneriffe 
or Atlas ; his stature reaches the sky. Contrast with 
these descriptions the lines in which Dante has de- 
scribed the gigantic spectre of Nimrod : ^ " His face 
seemed to me as long and as broad as the ball of St. 
Peter's at Eome, and his other limbs were in propor- 
tion; so that the bank, which concealed him from 
the waist downwards, nevertheless showed so much 
of him that three tall Germans would in vain have 
attempted to reach to his hair." We are sensible that 

1 Aqua Cheta is a river of Romagna. St. Benedict was the 
celebrated founder of the Benedictine monks (born 480 A. D.). 
See Inferno, xvi. 97. 

2 Aries is in France (Provence), near the mouth of the Rhone. 
See Inferno, ix. 112. 

3 Paradise Lost, i. 194 ; iv. 985. 

■^ Nimrod. See Genesis x. 8-12. The mighty hunter who 
figures as the founder of the Assyrio-Babylonian Empire. The 
passage translated is from the Inferno, xxxi. 58-64. Dante 
does not say " ball," but " pine," referring to a pine cone of 
bronze, which was taken from Hadrian's Mole and set in front 
of the old St. Peter's, but is now in the Vatican garden. So 
also he says Frieslanders, not Germans, on account of the fact 
that the former were supposed to be tall. 



MILTON. 31 

we do no justice to the admirable style of the Flor- 
entine poet. But Mr. Gary's ^ translation is not at 
hand; and our version, however rude, is sufficient to 
illustrate our meaning. 

Once more, compare the lazar house ^ in the elev- 
enth book of the "Paradise Lost" with the last ward 
of Malebolge^ in Dante. Milton avoids the loath- 
some details, and takes refuge in indistinct but sol- 
emn and tremendous imagery : Despair hurrying from 
couch to couch to mock the wretches with his atten- 
dance; Death shaking his dart over them, but, in 
spite of supplications, delaying to strike. What says 
Dante? "There was such a moan there as there 
would be if all the sick who, between July and Sep- 
tember, are in the hospitals of Valdichiana, and of 
the Tuscan swamps, and of Sardinia, were in one pit 
together; and such a stench was issuing forth as is 
wont to issue from decayed limbs. "^ 

We will not take upon ourselves the invidious office 
of settling precedency between two such writers. 
Each in his own department is incomparable; and 
each, we may remark, has wisely, or fortunately, 
taken a subject adapted to exhibit his peculiar talent 
to the greatest advantage. "The Divine Comedy" 
is a personal narrative. Dante is the eye-witness and 
ear-witness of that which he relates. He i^ the very 

1 Henry Francis Gary (1772-1844), whose blank verse trans- 
lation of Dante is still popular, although many poets, including 
Longfellow, have essayed the task in whole or in part. 

2 Paradise Lost, xi. 477 seq. Lazar-house, a hospital. (Cf. 
Lazarus.) 

^ Malebolge, the name given to the eighth circle of Hell. It 
is about equivalent to " Horrible Place." ^Infenio, xviii. 1. 

4 Inferno, xxix. 46-51. Valdichiana, a region in Tuscany now 
more salubrious than in Dante's time. 



32 MA CAUL AY. 

man who has heard the tormented spirits crying out 
for the second death ; ^ who has read the dusky char- 
acters ^ on the portal within which there is no hope ; 
who has hidden his face from the terrors of the Gor- 
gon ; ^ who has fled from the hooks and the seething 
pitch of Barbariccia and Draghignazzo.* His own 
hands have grasped the shaggy sides of Lucifer.^ 
His own feet have climbed the mountain of exjDia- 
tion.^ His own brow has been marked by the purify- 
ing angel." The reader would throw aside such a tale 
in incredulous disgust unless it were told with the 
strongest air of veracity; with a sobriety even in its 
horrors ; with the greatest precision and multiplicity 
in its details. The narrative of Milton in this re- 
spect differs from that of Dante, as the adventures of 
Amadis differ from those of Gulliver.^ The author 
of "Amadis " would have made his book ridiculous 
if he had introduced those minute particulars which 
give such a charm to the work of Swift, — the nauti- 
cal observations, the affected delicacy about names, 
the official documents transcribed at full length, and 

1 That is, for the death of the soul. Inferno, i. 117. 

2 The famous " Lasciate ogni Speranza, voi ch' entrate," " All 
hope abandon, ye who enter here." Inferno, iii. 9. 

^ See Inferno, ix. 56. 

* The ngimes of fiends. Inferno, xxi. 120, 121. 

^ See the last canto of the Infeimo. 

^ That is, the Mount of Purgatory. 

' Purgatorio, ix. 112. The angel at the entrance of Purgatory 
marks Dante's forehead with seven P's (peccata) for the Seven 
Deadly Sins. The marks disappear as he mounts upward. 

^ The hero of a once highly popular romance of chivalry, 
entitled A madis of Gaul, a Spanish work of the fourteenth cen- 
tury, though perhaps ^rst written in Portuguese by Vasco Lo- 
beira (died 1403). A French origin has also been claimed. 
Southey's condensed translation may be consulted. 



MILTON. 33 

all the unmeaning gossip and scandal of the court, 
springing out of nothing, and tending to nothing. 
We are not shocked at being told that a man who 
lived, nobody knows when, saw many very strange 
sights, and we can easily abandon ourselves to the 
illusion of the I'omance. But when Lemuel Gulliver, 
surgeon, resident at Rotherhithe, tells us of pygmies 
and giants, flying islands, and philosophizing horses, 
nothing but such circumstantial touches could produce 
for a single moment a deception on the imagination. 

Of all the poets who have introduced into their 
works the agency of supernatural beings, Milton has 
succeeded best. Here Dante decidedly yields to him ; 
and, as this is a point on which many rash and ill- 
considered judgments have been pronounced, we feel 
inclined to dwell on it a little longer. The most fatal 
error which a poet can possibly commit in the man- 
agement of his machinery is that of attempting to 
philosophize too much. Milton has been often cen- 
sured for ascribing to spirits many functions of which 
spirits must be incapable. But these objections, 
though sanctioned by eminent names, originate, we 
venture to say, in profound ignorance of the art of 
poetry. 

What is spirit? AVhat are our own minds, the 
portion of spirit with which we are best acquainted ? 
We observe certain phenomena. We cannot explain 
them into material causes. We therefore infer that 
there exists something which is not material. But of 
this something we have no idea. We can define it 
only by negatives. We can reason about it only by 
symbols. We use the word, but we have no image 
of the thing ; and the business of poetry is with im- 
ages, and not with words. The poet uses words in- 



34 MACAULAY. 

deed; but they are merely tlie instruments of his art, 
not its objects. They are the materials which he is 
to dispose in such a manner as to present a picture 
to the mental eye. And if they are not so disposed, 
they are no more entitled to be called poetry than a 
bale of canvas and a box of colors to be called a 
painting. 

Logicians may reason about abstractions, but the 
great mass of men must have images. The strong 
tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to 
idolatry can be explained on no other principle. The 
first inhabitants of Greece, there is reason to believe, 
worshiped one invisible Deity. ^ But the necessity of 
having something more definite to adore produced, 
in a few centuries, the innumerable crowd of gods 
and goddesses. In like manner the ancient Persians 
thought it impious to exhibit the Creator under a 
human form. Yet even these transferred to the sun 
the worship which, in speculation, they considered 
due only to the Supreme Mind. The history of the 
Jews is the record of a continued struggle between 
pure Theism, supported by the most terrible sanc- 
tions, and the strangely fascinating desire of having 
some visible and tangible object of adoration. Per- 
haps none of the secondary causes which Gibbon ^ 
has assigned for the rapidity with which Christianity 
spread over the world, while Judaism scarcely ever 
acquired a proselyte, operated more powerfully than 
this feeling. God, the uncreated, the incomprehensi- 
ble, the invisible, attracted few worshipers. A phi- 
losopher might admire so noble a conception, but 

^ Modern scholars would not all agree with this statement. 
2 See the famous and much censured sixteenth chapter of the 
Decline and Fall. 



,T-ON. 



MILTON. 35 

the crowd turned away in disgust from words which 
presented no image to their minds. It was before 
Deity embodied in a human form, walking among 
men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their 
bosoms, weeping over their graves, slumbering in the 
manger, bleeding on the cross, that the prejudices of 
the Synagogue, and the doubts of the Academy, and 
the pride of the Portico, and the fasces of the Lictor, 
and the swords of thirty legions, were humbled in 
the dust.^ Soon after Christianity had achieved its 
triumph, the principle which had assisted it began 
to corrupt it. It became a new paganism. Patron 
saints assumed the offices of household gods. St. 
George ^ took the place of Mars. St. Elmo ^ consoled 
the mariner for the loss of Castor and Pollux. The 
Virgin Mother and Cecilia* succeeded to Venus and 
the Muses. The fascination of sex and loveliness 
was again joined to that of celestial dignity, and the 

^ That is, the prejudices of Jews, Greek philosophers (Plato 
and Aristotle taught in the grove of Academos, and Zeno, foun- 
der of the Stoics, in the Porch), and Roman magistrates and 
soldiers yielded to the humane character of Christ. The lictor 
was the attendant of Roman executives, and carried the badge 
of authority, — the fasces, an axe in a bundle of rods. 

2 St. George of Cappadocia, who by a curious process became 
the patron saint of England. 

^ St. Elmo, the patron saint of Italian sailors, gave his name 
to the electric light seen on the masts and yards of ships, which 
phenomenon had been once attributed to the Dioscuri, i. e., Cas- 
tor and Pollux. 

* St. Cecilia, the patron saint of church music. Martyred, 
according to the very doubtful legend, about 230 A. d. The 
story goes that she invented the organ, and so a yearly nnisical 
festival is held in England on her day (November 22). The 
lover of poetry will alM^ays associate her with Dry den's two 
noble odes. 



36 MACAULAY. 

homage of chivalry was blended with that of religion. 
Reformers have often made a stand against these 
feelings, but never with more than apparent and par- 
tial success. The men who demolished the images 
in cathedrals have not always been able to demolish 
those which were enshrined in their minds. It would 
not be difiicult to show that in politics the same rule 
holds good. Doctrines, we are afraid, must gener- 
ally be embodied before they can excite a strong 
public feeling. The multitude is more easily inter- 
ested for the most unmeaning badge, or the most 
insignificant name, than for the most important prin- 
ciple. 

From these considerations we infer that no poet, 
who should affect that metaphysical accuracy for the 
want of which Milton has been blamed, would escape 
a disgraceful failure. Still, however, there was an- 
other extreme which, though far less dangerous, was 
also to be avoided. The imaginations of men are in 
a great measure under the control of their opinions. 
The most exquisite art of poetical coloring can pro- 
duce no illusion when it is employed to represent 
that which is at once perceived to be incongruous 
and absurd. Milton wrote in an age of philosoj^hers 
and theologians. It was necessary, therefore, for him 
to abstain from giving such a shock to their under- 
standings as might break the charm which it was 
his object to throw over their imaginations. This is 
the real explanation of the indistinctness and incon- 
sistency with which he has often been reproached. 
Dr. Johnson acknowledges that it was absolutely 
necessary that the spirits should be clothed with ma- 
terial forms. "But," says he, "the poet should have 
secured the consistency of his system by keeping 



MILTON. 37 

immateriality out of sight, and seducing the reader 
to drop it from his thoughts." ^ This is easily said; 
but what if Milton could not seduce his readers to 
drop immateriality from their thoughts ? What if the 
contrary opinion had taken so full a possession of 
the minds of men as to leave no room even for the 
half belief which poetry requires? Such we suspect 
to have been the case. It was impossible for the poet 
to adopt altogether the material or the immaterial 
system. He therefore took his stand on the debatable 
ground. He left the whole in ambiguity. He has 
doubtless, by so doing, laid himself open to the charge 
of inconsistency. But, though philosophically in the 
wrong, we cannot but believe that he was poetically 
in the right. This task, which almost any other 
writer would have found impracticable, was easy to 
him. The peculiar art which he possessed of commu- 
nicating his meaning circuitously through a long suc- 
cession of associated ideas, and of intimating more 
than he expressed, enabled him to disguise those in- 
congruities which he could not avoid. 

Poetry which relates to the beings of another world 
ought to be at once mysterious and picturesque. 
That of Milton is so. That of Dante is picturesque, 
indeed, beyond any that ever was written. Its effect 
approaches to that produced by the pencil or the 
chisel. But it is picturesque to the exclusion of all 
mystery. This is a fault on the right side, a fault 
inseparable from the plan of Dante's poem, which, 
as we have already observed, rendered the utmost 
accuracy of description necessary. Still it is a fault. 
The supernatural agents excite an interest, but it is 
not the interest which is proper to supernatural 
1 From the Life of Milton, toward the close. 



38 MACAULAY. 

agents. We feel that we could talk to tlie ghosts 
and demons without any emotion of unearthly awe. 
We could, like Don Juan, ask them to supper, and 
eat heartily in their company. ^ Dante's angels are 
good men with wings. His devils are spiteful, ugly 
executioners. His dead men are merely living men 
in strange situations. The scene which passes be- 
tween the poet and Farinata is justly celebrated. 
Still, Farinata in the burning tomb is exactly what 
Farinata would have been at an auto da feP' No- 
thing can be more touching than the first interview 
of Dante and Beatrice.^ Yet what is it but a lovely 
woman chiding, with sweet, austere composure, the 
lover for whose affection she is grateful, but whose 
vices she reprobates? The feelings which give the 
passage its charm would suit the streets of Florence 
as well as the summit of the Mount of Purgatory. 

The spirits of Milton are unlike those of almost all 
other writers. His fiends, in particular, are wonder- 
ful creations. They are not metaphysical abstrac- 
tions. They are not wicked men. They are not 
ugly beasts. They have no horns, no tails, none of 
the fee-faw-fum of Tasso and Klopstock.* They have 
just enough in common with human nature to be in- 
telligible to human beings. Their characters are, 
like their forms, marked by a certain dim resemblance 
to those of men, but exaggerated to gigantic dimen- 
sions, and veiled in mysterious gloom. 

^ Refers to a scene in Mozart's opera of this name. 

- Inferno, x. 32. 

^ Beatrice Portinari, Dante's early love, who meets him in 
Purgatory and guides him through Paradise. 

■i Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803), author of the 
Messias, who is generally, but with much exaggeration, called 
the German Milton, 



MILTON. 39 

Perhaps the gods and daemons ^ of ^schyhis may 
best bear a comparison with the angels and devils of 
Milton. The style of the Athenian had, as we have 
remarked, something of the Oriental character; and 
the same peculiarity may be traced in his mythology. 
It has nothing of the amenity and elegance which we 
generally find in the superstitions of Greece. All 
is rugged, barbaric, and colossal. The legends of 
^schylus seem to harmonize less with the fragrant 
groves and graceful porticos, in which his countrymen 
paid their vows to the God of Light and Goddess of 
Desire, than with those huge and grotesque labyrinths 
of eternal granite in which Egypt enshrined her mys- 
tic Osiris, or in which Hindostan still bows down to 
her seven-headed idols. His favorite gods are those 
of the elder generation, the sons of heaven and earth, 
compared with whom Jupiter himself was a stripling 
and an upstart, — the gigantic Titans and the inex- 
orable Furies. Foremost among his creations of this 
class stands Prometheus, half fiend, half redeemer, 
the friend of man, the sullen and implacable enemy 
of Heaven. Prometheus bears undoubtedly a consid- 
erable resemblance to the Satan of Milton. In both 
we find the same impatience of control, the same 
ferocity, the same unconquerable pride. In both 
characters, also, are mingled, though in very differ- 
ent proportions, some kind and generous feelings. 
Prometheus, however, is hardly superhuman enough. 
He talks too much of his chains and his uneasy pos- 
ture; he is rather too much depressed and agitated. 
His resolution seems to depend on the knowledge 
which he possesses that he holds the fate of his tor- 

1 A Greek word for " spirit," not to be confused with " de- 
mons " used in a bad sense. Prometheus was a daemon. 



40 MA CAUL AY. 

turer in his hands, and that the hour of his release 
will surely come. But Satan is a creature of another 
sphere. The might of his intellectual nature is victo- 
rious over the extremity of pain. Amidst agonies 
which cannot be conceived without horror, he deliber- 
ates, resolves, and even exults. Against the sword 
of Michael, against the thunder of Jehovah, against 
the flaming lake and the marl burning with solid 
fire, against the prospect of an eternity of uninter- 
mitted misery, his spirit bears up unbroken, resting 
on its own innate energies, requiring no support from 
anything external, nor even from hope itself.^ 

To return for a moment to the parallel which we 
have been attempting to draw between Milton and 
Dante, we would add that the poetry of these great 
men has in a considerable degree taken its character 
from their moral qualities. They are not egotists. 
They rarely obtrude their idiosyncrasies on their 
readers. They have nothing in common with those 
modern beggars for fame who extort a pittance from 
the compassion of the inexperienced by exposing the 
nakedness and sores of their minds. Yet it would be 
difficult to name two writers whose works have been 
more completely, though undesignedly, colored by their 
personal feelings. 

The character of Milton was peculiarly distin- 
guished by loftiness of spirit, that of Dante by in- 
tensity of feeling. In every line of the "Divine 
Comedy "we discern the asperity which is produced 
by pride struggling with misery. There is perhaps 
no work in the world so deeply and uniformly sorrow- 
ful. The melancholy of Dante was no fantastic ca- 
price. It was not, as far as at this distance of time 
1 See Paradise Lost, vi. 



MILTON. 41 

can be judged, the effect of external circumstances. 
It was from within. Neither love nor glory, neither 
the conflicts of earth nor the hope of heaven, could 
dispel it. It turned every consolation and every 
pleasure into its own nature. It resembled that nox- 
ious Sardinian soil of which the intense bitterness is 
said to have been perceptible even in its honey. His 
mind was, in the noble language of the Hebrew poet, 
"a land of darkness, as darkness itself, and where 
the light was as darkness." ^ The gloom of his char- 
acter discolors all i\\g passions of men and all the 
face of nature, and tinges with its own livid hue the 
flowers of Paradise and the glories of the eternal 
throne. All the portraits of him are singularly char- 
acteristic. No jDcrson can look on the features, noble 
even to ruggedness, the dark furrows of the cheek, 
the haggard and woeful stare of the eye, the sullen 
and contemptuous curve of the lip, and doubt that 
they belong to a man too proud and too sensitive to 
be happy. 

Milton was, like Dante, a statesman and a lover ; 
and, like Dante, he had been unfortunate in ambition 
and in love. He had survived his health and his 
sight, the comforts of his home, and the prosperity of 
his party. Of the great men by whom he had been 
distinguished at his entrance into life, some had been 
taken away from the evil to come ; some had carried 
into foreign climates their unconquerable hatred of 
oppression; some were pining in dungeons; and some 
had poured forth their blood on scaffolds. Venal 
and licentious scribblers, with just sufficient talent to 
clothe the thoughts of a pandar in the style of a bell- 
man, were now the favorite writers of the sovereign 
1 Job X. 22. 



42 MA CAUL AY. 

and of the public. ^ It was a loathsome herd, which 
could be compared to nothing so fitly as to the rabble 
of "Comus," — grotesque monsters, half bestial, half 
human, dropping with wine, bloated with gluttony, 
and reeling in obscene dances. Amidst these that 
fair Muse was placed, like the chaste lady of the 
masque, lofty, spotless, and serene, to be chattered 
at, and pointed at, and grinned at, by the whole rout 
of satyrs and goblins. If ever despondency and as- 
perity could be excused in any man, they might have 
been excused in Milton. But the strength of his 
mind overcame every calamity. Neither blindness, 
nor gout, nor age, nor penury, nor domestic afflic- 
tions, nor political disappointments, nor abuse, nor 
proscription, nor neglect, had power to disturb his 
sedate and majestic patience. His spirits do not 
seem to have been high, but they were singularly 
equable. His temper was serious, perhaps stern; 
but it was a temper which no sufferings could render 
sullen or fretful. Such as it was when, on the eve 
of great events, he returned from his travels, in the 
prime of health and manly beauty, loaded with liter- 
ary distinctions and glowing with patriotic hopes, — 
such it continued to be when, after having exjDerienced 
every calamity which is incident to our nature, old, 
poor, sightless, and disgraced, he retired to his hovel 
to die. 2 

Hence it was that, though he wrote the "Paradise 

^ To state, as Macaulay practically does, that the leading 
writers of Charles II. 's reign were as lacking in the graces of 
style as they were in moral soundness of subject-matter is, to 
say the least, extravagant. 

2 Hovel is an exaggeration, though Milton did die poor and in 
retirement. Notice the manner in which this sentence is bal- 
anced. 



MILTON. 43 

Lost" at a time of life when images of beauty and 
tenderness are in general beginning to fade, even 
from those minds in which they have not been effaced 
by anxiety and disappointment, he adorned it with 
all that is most lovely and delightful in the physi- 
cal and in the moral world. Neither Theocritus 
nor Ariosto ^ had a finer or a more healthful sense of 
the pleasantness of external objects, or loved better 
to luxuriate amidst sunbeams and flowers, the songs 
of nightingales, the juice of summer fruits, and the 
coolness of shady fountains. His conception of love 
unites all the voluptuousness of the Oriental harem, 
and all the gallantry of the chivalric tournament, 
with all the pure and quiet affection of an English 
fireside. 2 His poetry reminds us of the miracles of 
Alpine scenery. Nooks and dells beautiful as fairy- 
land are embosomed in its most rugged and gigantic 
elevations. The roses and myrtles bloom unchilled 
on the verge of the avalanche. 

Traces, indeed, of the peculiar character of Milton 
may be found in all his works, but it is most strongly 
displayed in the Sonnets. Those remarkable poems 
have been undervalued by critics who have not un- 
derstood their nature. They have no epigrammatic 
point. There is none of the ingenuity of Filicaja^ in 

1 Ariosto (1474-1533), the great Italian poet of chivalry, 
author of the Orlando Furioso. He was a favorite of Macaulay's. 

2 Matthew Arnold, in his essay entitled A French Critic on 
Milton, very properly finds fault with this remarkable statement, 
but is too polite to call it nonsense. 

3 Vincenzo da Filicaia (1642-1707), a Florentine poet and 
scholar, whose odes on Sobieski's rescue of Vienna were much 
admired, and secured him high official station. For Macaulay's 
estimate of him see the essay on Addison. 



44 MA CAUL AY. 

the thought, none of the hard and brilliant enamel ^ 
of Petrarch in the style. They are simple but majes- 
tic records of the feelings of the poet, as little tricked 
out for the public eye as his diary would have been. 
A victory, an expected attack upon the city, a mo- 
mentary fit of depression or exultation, a jest thit)wn 
out against one of his books, a dream which for a 
short time restored to him that beautiful face over 
which the grave had closed forever, ^ led him to mus- 
ings which, without effort, shaped themselves into 
verse. The unity of sentiment and severity of style 
which characterize these little pieces remind us of 
the Greek Anthology, ^ or perhaps still more of the 
Collects of the English Liturgy. The noble poem 
on the Massacres of Piedmont is strictly a collect in 
verse. ^ 

The Sonnets are more or less striking, according as 
the occasions which gave birth to them are more or 
less interesting. But they are, almost without excep- 
tion, dignified by a sobriety and greatness of mind to 
which we know not where to look for a parallel. It 
would, indeed, be scarcely safe to draw any decided 
inferences as to the character of a writer from pas- 

1 It would be, perhaps, difficult to find more inappropriate 
epithets for Petrarch's style. 

2 Sonnet xxiii., a beautiful tribute to his second wife, Kather- 
ine Woodcock, whom Milton probably never saw. The other 
sonnets referred to are probably, in order, Nos. xv., viii., xix., 
XX., and xi.-xii. 

^ The great collection of Greek nosegays of poetry, as the 
name implies, — which was successively added to from 100 b. c. 
to the fourteenth century, A. d. It has served as a mine for 
translators. See the selections from it in the Canterbury Poets. 

^ This, is one of the most felicitous bits of criticism to be 
found in Macaulay's writings. 



MILTON, 45 

sages directly egotistical. But the qualities which 
we have ascribed to Milton, though perhaps most 
strongly marked in those parts of his works which 
treat of his personal feelings, are distinguishable in 
every page, and impart to all his writings, prose and 
poetry, English, Latin, and Italian, a strong family 
likeness. 

His public conduct was such as was to be expected 
from a man of a spirit so high and of an intellect so 
powerful. He lived at one of the most memorable 
eras in the history of mankind, — at the very crisis of 
the great conflict between Oromasdes and Arimanes,^ 
liberty and despotism, reason and prejudice. That 
great battle was fought for no single generation, for 
no single land. The destinies of the human race were 
staked on the same cast with the freedom of the Eng- 
lish people. Then were first proclaimed those mighty 
principles which have since worked their way into the 
depths of the American forests, which have roused 
Greece from the slavery and degradation of two thou- 
sand years, and which, from one end of Europe to 
the other, have kindled an unquenchable fire in the 
hearts of the oppressed, and loosed the knees of the 
oppressors with an unwonted fear. 

Of those principles, then struggling for their infant 
existence, Milton was the most devoted and eloquent 
literary champion. We need not say how much we 

^ Persian deities representing the principles of good and evil, 
light and darkness, respectively. Macaulay's partisanship here 
is too obvious to need comment, but it should be noted that 
the recent founding of the South American republics that had 
cast off the yoke of Spain, the contemporary struggle of Greece 
against Turkey, and the repressive measures of the Holy Alli- 
ance naturally gave a militant tone to his intense Whig prejudices. 



46 MACAULAY. 

admire his public conduct. But we cannot disguise 
from ourselves that a large portion of his countrymen 
still think it unjustifiable. The Civil War, indeed, 
has been more discussed, and is less understood, than 
any event in English history. The friends of liberty 
labored under the disadvantage of which the lion in 
the fable complained so bitterly.^ Though they were 
the conquerors, their enemies were the painters. As 
a body, the Roundheads had done their utmost to 
decry and ruin literature; and literature was even 
with them, as, in the long run, it always is with its 
enemies. The best book on their side of the ques- 
tion is the charming narrative of Mrs. Hutchinson. 
May's "History of the Parliament" is good, but it 
breaks off at the most interesting crisis of the strug- 
gle. The performance of Ludlow is foolish and vio- 
lent ; and most of the later writers who have espoused 
the same cause — Oldmixon, for instance, and Cather- 
ine Macaulay — have, to say the least, been more dis- 
tinguished by zeal than either by candor or by skill. ^ 

1 See Spectator No, 11. 

2 The writers here enumerated on the popular side of the great 
controversy between the Parliament and the King are suffi- 
ciently characterized by Macaulay, and little more information 
need be given about them. Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1659) 
was a very scholarly woman who wrote a life of her husband, 
Col. John Hutchinson, a parliamentary soldier and a fine char- 
acter. The book was first printed in 1806. Thomas May 
(1594-1650) was a well educated man who, besides his history 
(which went down to 1643), wrote several plays. The memoirs 
of General Edmund Ludlow (1620-1693) are considered valua- 
ble by some critics. John Oldmixon (1673-1742) was a Whig 
pamphleteer, satirized by Pope, who wrote a Critical History of 
England. Finally Mrs. Catherine Macaulay (1733-1791) was a 
violent republican who wrote an eight-volume history beginning 
at the reign of James I. 



MILTON. 47 

On the other side are the most authoritative and the 
most popular historical works in our language, — that 
of Clarendon and that of Hume. The former is not 
only ably written and full of valuable information, 
but has also an air of dignity and sincerity which 
makes even the prejudices and errors with which it 
abounds respectable. Hume, from whose fascinating 
narrative the great mass of the reading public are 
still contented to take their opinions, hated religion 
so much that he hated liberty for having been allied 
with religion, and has pleaded the cause of tyranny 
with the dexterity of an advocate, while affecting the 
impartiality of a judge. 

The public conduct of Milton must be approved or 
condemned, according as the resistance of the people 
to Charles I. shall appear to be justifiable or criminal. 
We shall therefore make no apology for dedicating 
a few pages to the discussion of that interesting and 
most important question. We shall not argue it on 
general grounds. We shall not recur to those pri- 
mary principles from which the claim of any govern- 
ment to the obedience of its subjects is to be deduced. 
We are entitled to that vantage-ground, but we will 
relinquish it. We are, on this point, so confident of 
superiority that we are not unwilling to imitate the 
ostentatious generosity of those ancient knights who 
vowed to joust without helmet or shield against all 
enemies, and to give their antagonists the advantage 
of sun and wind. We will take the naked consti- 
tutional question. We confidently affirm that every 
reason which can be urged in favor of the Kevolution 
of 1688 may be urged with at least equal force in 
favor of what is called the Great Rebellion. 

In one respect only, we think, can the warmest 



48 MACAULAY. 

admirers of Charles venture to say that he was a 
better sovereign than his son. He was not, in name 
and profession, a Papist; we say in name and pro- 
fession, because both Charles himself and his crea- 
ture Laud,^ while they abjured the innocent badges 
of Popery, retained all its worst vices, — a comi3lete 
subjection of reason to authority, a weak preference 
of form to substance, a childish passion for mum- 
meries, an idolatrous veneration for the priestly char- 
acter, and, above all, a merciless intolerance. This, 
however, we waive. We will concede that Charles 
was a good Protestant, but we say that his Protes- 
tantism does not make the slightest distinction be- 
tween his case and that of James. 

The principles of the Revolution have often been 
grossly misrepresented, and never more than in the 
course of the present year. There is a certain class 
of men who, while they profess to hold in reverence 
the great names and great actions of former times, 
never look at them for any other purpose than in 
order to find in them some excuse for existing abuses. ^ 
In every venerable precedent they pass by what is 
essential and take only what is accidental ; they keep 
out of sight what is beneficial, and hold up to public 
imitation all that is defective. If, in any part of any 
great example, there be anything unsound, these flesh 
flies detect it with an unerring instinct, and dart uj^on 

^ William Laud (1573-1645), Archbishop of Canterbury, and 
one of the chief advisers of Charles I. against the popular party 
who finally caused his execution, was so obnoxious to Macaulay 
that it will not do to accept unreservedly anything that the his- 
torian says of him. 

^ Macaulay here refers to the opponents of the measures pro- 
posed for the relief of Roman Catholics from political disabilities, 
a consummation obtained in 1829. 



MILTON. 49 

it with a ravenous delight. If some good end has 
been attained in spite of them, they feel, with their 
prototype, that their 

" Labor must be to pervert that end, 
And out of good still to find means of evil." ^ 

To the blessings which England has derived from 
the Revolution these people are utterly insensible. 
The expulsion of a tyrant, the solemn recognition of 
popular rights, — liberty, security, toleration, — all 
go for nothing with them. One sect^ there was 
which, from unfortunate temporary causes, it was 
thought necessary to keej) under close restraint. One 
part of the empire ^ there was so unhappily circum- 
stanced that at that time its misery was necessary to 
our happiness, and its slavery to our freedom. These 
are the parts of the Revolution which the politicians 
of whom we speak love to contemplate, and which 
seem to them, not indeed to vindicate, but in some 
degree to palliate, the good which it has produced. 
Talk to them of Naples, of Spain, or of South Amer- 
ica: they stand forth zealots for the doctrine of Di- 
vine Right,* which has now come back to us, like 
a thief from transportation,^ under the alias of Legi- 

^ Paradise Lost, i. 164, 165. 

2 Roman Catholics. 

^ Ireland. 

■* The gist of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, which 
was held by High Churchmen and Tories throughout the Stuart 
period, is that the king is the father of his people and holds his 
authority from God, not, as nearly all nations now believe, from 
the consent of the governed. Hence resistance to the king was 
more than a crime against the state, — it was a crime against 
God. 

^ The practice of transporting convicts to Australia did not 
cease till 1852. 



50 MACAULAY. 

timacy. But mention the miseries of Ireland. Then 
William 1 is a hero. Then Somers and Shrewsbury ^ 
are great men. Then the Kevolution is a glorious 
era! The very same persons who, in this country, 
never omit an opportunity of reviving every wretched 
Jacobite ^ slander respecting the Whigs of that period, 
have no sooner crossed St. George's Channel than 
they begin to fill their bumpers to the glorious and 
immortal memory.'^ They may truly boast that they 
look not at men, but at measures. So that evil be 
done, they care not who does it ; the arbitrary Charles 
or the liberal William, Ferdinand the Catholic or 
Frederick the Protestant.^ On such occasions their 
deadliest opponents may reckon upon their candid 
construction. The bold assertions of these people 
have of late impressed a large portion of the public 
with an opinion that James II. was expelled simply 
because he was a Catholic, and that the Kevolution 
was essentially a Protestant revolution. 

But this certainly was not the case, nor can any 
person who has acquired more knowledge of the his- 
tory of those times than is to be found in Goldsmith's 

1 WilHam III. — certainly Macaulay's hero in the History. 

2 John, Lord Somers (1652-1716), and Charles Talbot, Earl 
of Shrewsbury (1660-1718), took leading parts in the Revolution 
of 1688 and were Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State respec- 
tively under William. Somers ranks high as a pubhcist and is 
a favorite of Macaulay's. 

3 The Jacobites were the adherents of James II. (Latin Ja- 
cohus). 

4 Of WiUiam III. — the regular Whig toast. 

^ Charles, I. and William III., oppressors of England and 
Ireland respectively, and the reigning sovereigns of Spain and 
Prussia, oppressors of their peoples in 1825, alike appeal, so 
Macaulav thinks and avers, to his own political opponents. 



MILTON. 51 

"Abridgment" believe that, if James had held his 
own religious opinions without wishing to make pros- 
elytes, or if, wishing even to make proselytes, he 
had contented himself with exerting only his constitu- 
tional influence for that purpose, the Prince of Orange 
would ever have been invited over. Our ancestors, 
we suppose, knew their own meaning; and, if we 
may believe them, their hostility was primarily, not to 
Popery, but to tyranny. They did not drive out a 
tyrant because he was a Catholic, but they excluded 
Catholics from the Crown because they thought them 
likely to be tyrants. The ground on which they, in 
their famous resolution,^ declared the throne vacant, 
was this: "that James had broken the fundamental 
laws of the kingdom." Every man, therefore, who 
approves of the Revolution of 1688 must hold that 
the breach of fundamental laws on the part of the 
sovereign justifies resistance. The question, then, is 
this : Had Charles I. broken the fundamental laws of 
England ? 

No person can answer in the negative unless he 
refuses credit, not merely to all the accusations 
brought against Charles by his opponents, but to the 
narratives of the warmest Royalists, and to the con- 
fessions of the king himself. If there be any truth 
in any historian of any party who has related the 
events of that reign, the conduct of Charles, from his 
accession to the meeting of the Long Parliament, ^ had 
been a continued course of oppression and treachery. 
Let those who applaud the Revolution and condemn 
the Rebellion mention one act of James 11. to which 

1 Resolution of Parliament in 1689. 

2 It continued from 1640 to 1660, with an intermission under 
Cromwell. 



52 MACAULAY. 

a parallel is not to be found in the history of his 
father. Let them lay their fingers on a single article 
in the Declaration of Right, presented by the two 
houses to William and Mary, which Charles is not 
acknowledged to have violated. He had, according 
to the testimony of his own friends, usurped the func- 
tions of the legislature, raised taxes without the con- 
sent of Parliament, and quartered troops on the j)eo- 
ple in the most illegal and vexatious manner. Not 
a single session of Parliament had passed without 
some unconstitutional attack on the freedom of de- 
bate. The right of petition was grossly violated. 
Arbitrary judgments, exorbitant fines, and unwar- 
ranted imprisonments were grievances of daily occur- 
rence. If these things do not justify resistance, the 
Revolution was treason ; if they do, the great Rebel- 
lion was laudable. 

But, it is said, why not adopt milder measures? 
Why, after the king had consented to so many re- 
forms and renounced so many oppressive preroga- 
tives, did the Parliament continue to rise in their 
demands at the risk of provoking a civil war ? The 
ship money ^ had been given uj), the Star Chamber ^ 
had been abolished, provision had been made for the 
frequent convocation and secure deliberation of Par- 
liaments. Why not pursue an end confessedly good 
by peaceable and regular means? We recur again 
to the analogy of the Revolution. Why was James 
driven from the throne? Why was he not retained 

^ Ship money refers to the illegal endeavor of Charles I. 
to raise money by enforcing old and obsolete precedents with 
regard to the furnishing of ships by the seaport towns. 

2 For this peculiar, extra-constitutional court, used by the 
king and his ministers as an instrument of tyranny, see Green. 



MILTON. 53 

upon conditions ? He, too, had offered to call a free 
Parliament, and to submit to its decision all the mat- 
ters in dispute. Yet we are in the habit of praising 
our forefathers, who preferred a revolution, a dis- 
puted succession, a dynasty of strangers, twenty years 
of foreign and intestine war, a standing army, and 
a national debt, to the rule, however restricted, of a 
tried and proved tyrant. ^ The Long Parliament acted 
on the same principle, and is entitled to the same 
praise. They could not trust the king. He had, no 
doubt, passed salutary laws ; but what assurance was 
there that he would not break them? He had re- 
nounced oppressive prerogatives, but where was the 
security that he would not resume them ? The nation 
had to deal with a man whom no tie could bind ; a 
man who made and broke promises with equal facility ; 
a man whose honor had been a hundred times pawned 
and never redeemed. 

Here, indeed, the Long Parliament stands on still 
stronger ground than the Convention of 1688. No 
action of James can be compared to the conduct of 
Charles with respect to the Petition of Right. ^ The 
Lords and Commons present him with a bill in which 
the constitutional limits of his power are marked out. 
He hesitates ; he evades ; at last he bargains to give 

^ Macaulay is here epitomizing the history of England during 
the generation after the Revolution. H^ refers to the claims of 
the exiled Stuarts, to the preference of the early Hanoverians 
for Germany, to the wars with Louis XIV., and in Ireland and 
Scotland to the permanent army which William's foreign policy 
necessitated, and to the issuing of bonds to meet the expenses 
of his government. 

2 Presented to Charles I. in 1628, petitioning against taxation 
without consent of Parliament, unlawful imprisonments, quarter- 
ing of troops, etc.; a most important document. 



54 MA CA ULA y. 

his nssoiit for five HubsidicH. The bill receives his 
HoJcinii jissciit; the subsidies are voted; but no sooner 
is th(! tyrant relieved than he returns at onee to all 
the arl)itrary measures whieh he had bound himself 
to aband(m, and violates all the clauses of tlie very 
a(;t whieli h(; Iiad l)een ])aid to pass. 

For more than ten years the ])eoi)]e liad seen the 
ri;4lits whiidi were theirs by a (Undde claim — by 
imnuimorial inheritance and by recent purchase — 
infringed by the pei-lidious king wlio had recognized 
th(nn. At hiiigth circumstances compelled CJiarles to 
sunnnon another Parliament.^ Another chance was 
given to our fathers; were they to throw it away as 
they had thrown away the former? Were they again 
to be cozened by Ic Roi le veittf^ Were they again 
to advance their money on pledges wliich liad been 
forfeited over and over again ? Were they to lay a 
second l*etition of Right at tlie foot of the throne, to 
grant another lavish aid in exchange for another un- 
meaning ceremony, and then to talce their dei)arture, 
till, after ten years more of fraud and oppression, 
their prince should again require a sui)ply, and agjiin 
rei)ay it with a perjury? They were compelled to 
choose whether they would trust a tyrant or conquer 
him. We tliink that they chose wisely and nobly. 

The advocates of Charles, like the advocates of 
other malefactors against whom overwhelming evi- 

^ The troubles in England and Ireland, and more especially 
in Scotland, put an end to the period of personal government 
(1629-1G40) and led to the calling of the Long Parliament. 

2 "The King wills it" — the formula of royal consent to an 
Act of Parliauient, dating from Anglo-Norman times. The cor- 
responding negative is no longer used, as the veto pow^er has 
lapsed. 



MILT ox. oij 

dence is produced, generally dec-line all controversy 
about the facts, and content themselves with calling 
testimony to chara^it^r. He had so many private 
virtues I And had James II. no private virtues? 
Was Oliver Cromwell, his bitterest enemies them- 
selves being judges, destitute of private virtues? 
And what, after all, are the virtues ascribed U) 
Charles? A religious zeal, not more sincere than 
that of his son, and fully as weak and naiTow-minded, 
and a few of the ordinary household decencies which 
half the tfjmbst^jnes in England claim for those who 
lie beneath them. A grxid fatherl A good husband I 
Ample apologies indeed for fifteen years of persecu- 
tion, tyranny, and falsehood I 

We charge him with liaving Ijroken his coronation 
oath, and we are told that he kept his marriage vow I 
\V'e accuse him of having given up his people to the 
merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed and hard- 
heailed of prelat^^s,^ and the defense is that he took 
his little son on his knee and kissed liim! We cen- 
sure him for having violated the articles of the Pe- 
tition of Kiglit, after having, for good and valuable 
consideration, promised to ol^serve them ; and we are 
informed that he was accustomed to hear prayers at 
six o'clock in the morning! It is to such considera- 
tions as these, together with his Vandyke ^ dress, his 
handsome face, and his peaked beard, that he owes, 
we verily believe, most of his p^jpularity with the 
present generation. 

For ourselves, we own that we do not understand 
the common phrase, "a good man, but a bad king." 

2 Referring to the many pictures made of Charles by the 
famous Flemish painter, Sir Anthony Van Dyck (lo99-lG41). 



56 MA CAUL AY. 

We can as easily conceive a good man and an unnatu- 
ral father, or a good man and a treacherous friend. 
We cannot, in estimating the character of an indi- 
vidual, leave out of our consideration his conduct in 
the most important of all human relations ; and if in 
that relation we find him to have been selfish, cruel, 
and deceitful, we shall take the liberty to call him a 
bad man, in spite of all his temperance at table and 
all his regularity at chapel.^ 

We cannot refrain from adding a few words respect- 
ing a tojiic on which the defenders of Charles are fond 
of dwelling. If, they say, he governed his people ill, 
he at least governed them after the example of his 
predecessors. If he violated their privileges, it was 
because those privileges had not been accurately de- 
fined. No act of oppression has ever been imputed 
to him which has not a parallel in the annals of the 
Tudor s. This point Hume has labored, ^ with an art 
which is as discreditable in a historical work as it 
would be admirable in a forensic address. The an- 
swer is short, clear, and decisive. Charles had as- 
sented to the Petition of Right. He had renounced 
the oppressive powers said to have been exercised by 
his predecessors, and he had renounced them for 
money. He was not entitled to set up his antiquated 
claims against his own recent release. 

These arguments are so obvious that it may seem 
superfluous to dwell upon them, but those who have 

1 Macaulay undoubtedly minimizes the amount of allowance 
to be made for Charles in consideration of his inherited ideas as 
to the divine origin of his power and of the teachings of his blind 
and selfish courtiers. He feels that this charge may be made 
against him, so he meets it in the next paragraph with an argu- 
ment which simply opens up the same old discussion. 

2 That is, elaborated. 



MILTON. 57 

observed how much the events of that time are mis- 
represented and misunderstood will not blame us for 
stating the case simply. It is a case of which the 
simj^lest statement is the strongest. 

The enemies of the Parliament, indeed, rarely 
choose to take issue on the great points of the ques- 
tion. They content themselves with exposing some 
of the crimes and follies to which public commotions 
necessarily give birth. They bewail the unmerited 
fate of Strafford.^ They execrate the lawless violence 
of the army. They laugh at the scriptural names of 
the preachers. Major-generals fleecing their districts; 
soldiers reveling on the spoils of a ruined peasantry; 
upstarts, enriched by the public plunder, taking pos- 
session of the hospitable firesides and hereditary trees 
of the old gentry ; boys smashing the beautiful win- 
dows of cathedrals ; Quakers ^ riding naked through 
the market-place ; Fifth-monarchy men ^ shouting for 
King Jesus ; agitators lecturing from the tops of tubs 
on the fate of Agag, — all these, they tell us, were 
the offspring of the Great Rebellion. 

Be it so. We are not careful to answer in this 
matter. These charges, were they infinitely more 
important, would not alter our opinion of an event 
which alone has made us to differ from the slaves 
who crouch beneath despotic sceptres. Many evils, 
no doubt, were produced by the Civil War. They 

1 Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (1593-1641), the able 
but misleading adviser of Charles I., who was executed under 
act of attainder. Browning has written a tragedy about him. 

^ George Fox began his work shortly before Charles's execu- 
tion, but the sect was not organized till after the Restoration. 

^ They believed that they must bring about by force the im- 
mediate kingdom of Christ, which would thus succeed the rule 
of Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome. 



58 MACAULAY. 

were the price of our liberty. Has the acquisition 
been worth the sacrifice ? It is the nature of the devil 
of tyranny to tear and rend the body which he leaves. ^ 
Are the miseries of continued possession less horrible 
than the struggles of the tremendous exorcism ? 

If it were possible that a people brought up under 
an intolerant and arbitrary system could subvert that 
system without acts of cruelty and folly, half the ob- 
jections to despotic power would be removed. We 
should, in that case, be compelled to acknowledge 
that it at least produces no j)ernicious effects on the 
intellectual and moral character of a nation. We 
deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. 
But the more violent the outrages, the more assured 
we feel that a revolution was necessary. The vio- 
lence of those outrages will always be proportioned to 
the ferocity and ignorance of the people, and the fero- 
city and ignorance of the people will be proportioned 
to the oppression and degradation under which they 
have been accustomed to live. Thus it was in our 
Civil AVar. The heads of the Church and State reaped 
only that which they had sown. The government had 
prohibited free discussion; it had done its best to 
keep the people unacquainted with their duties and 
their rights. The retribution was just and natural. 
If our rulers suffered from popular ignorance, it was 
because they had themselves taken away the key of 
knowledge. If they were assailed with blind fury, 
it was because they had exacted an equally blind sub- 
mission. 

It is the character of such revolutions that we 
always see the worst of them at first. Till men have 

^ Macaulay in his Conversation between Milton and Cowley 
had made Milton use this very same Biblical figure. 



MILTON. 59 

been some time free, they know not how to use their 
freedom. The natives of wine countries are generally 
sober. In climates where wine is a rarity intem- 
perance abounds. A newly liberated people may be 
compared to a northern army encamped on the Rhine 
or the Xeres.^ It is said that, when soldiers in such 
a situation first find themselves able to indulge with- 
out restraint in such a rare and expensive luxury, 
nothing is to be seen but intoxication. Soon, how- 
ever, plenty teaches discretion, and, after wine has 
been for a few months their daily fare, they become 
more temperate than they had ever been in their own 
country. In the same manner, the final and perma- 
nent fruits of liberty are wisdom, moderation, and 
mercy. Its immediate effects are often atrocious 
crimes, conflicting errors, skepticism on points the 
most clear, dogmatism on points the most mysterious.^ 
It is just at this crisis that its enemies love to ex- 
hibit it. They pull down the scaffolding from the 
half -finished edifice; they point to the flying dust, 
the falling bricks, the comfortless rooms, the frightful 
irregularity of the whole appearance, and then ask in 
scorn where the promised splendor and comfort is to 
be found. If such miserable sophisms were to prevail, 
there would never be a good house or a good govern- 
ment in the world. 

Ariosto tells a pretty story ^ of a fairy, who, by 
some mysterious law of her nature, was condemned to 
appear at certain seasons in the form of a foul and 
poisonous snake. Those who injured her during the 

1 Xeres. Not a river, but the Spanish town Jerez de la 
Frontera, near Cadiz. Sherry gets its name from the place. 

2 Notice the balancing, 

" Orlando Furioso, xliii. 72. 



60 MACAULAY. 

period of her disguise were forever excluded from 
participation in tlie blessings which she bestowed. 
But to those who, in spite of her loathsome aspect, 
pitied and protected her, she afterwards revealed her- 
self in the beautiful and celestial form which was nat- 
ural to her ; accompanied their steps, granted all their 
wishes, filled their houses with wealth, made them 
happy in love and victorious in war. Such a spirit 
is Liberty. At times she takes the form of a hate- 
ful reptile. She grovels, she hisses, she stings. But 
woe to those who in disgust shall venture to crush 
her! And happy are those who, having dared to 
receive her in her degraded and frightful shape, shall 
at length be rewarded by her in the time of her 
beauty and her glory ! 

There is only one cure for the evils which newly 
acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom. 
When a prisoner first leaves his cell he cannot bear 
the light of day; he is unable to discriminate colors 
or recognize faces. But the remedy is, not to remand 
him into his dungeon, but to accustom him to the 
rays of the sun. The blaze of truth and liberty may 
at first dazzle and bewilder nations which have be- 
come half blind in the house of bondage. But let 
them gaze on, and they will soon be able to bear it. 
In a few years men learn to reason. The extreme 
violence of opinions subsides. Hostile theories cor- 
rect each other. The scattered elements of truth 
cease to contend, and begin to coalesce. And at 
length a system of justice and order is educed out of 
the chaos. 

Many politicians of our time are in the habit of 
laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no 
people ought to be free till they are fit to use their 



MILTON. 61 

freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old 
story, who resolved not to go into the water till he 
had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty 
till they become wise and good in slavery, they may 
indeed wait forever. 

Therefore it is that we decidedly approve of the 
conduct of Milton and the other wise and good men 
who, in spite of much that was ridiculous and hateful 
in the conduct of their associates, stood firmly by the 
cause of public liberty. We are not aware that the 
poet has been charged with personal participation in 
any of the blamable excesses of that time. The favo- 
rite topic of his enemies is the line of conduct which 
he pursued with regard to the execution of the king. 
Of that celebrated proceeding we by no means ap- 
prove. Still we must say, in justice to the many 
eminent persons who concurred in it, and in justice 
more particularly to the eminent person who defended 
it, that nothing can be more absurd than the impu- 
tations which, for the last hundred and sixty years, 
it has been the fashion to cast upon the Regicides.^ 
We have, throughout, abstained from appealing to 
first principles. We will not appeal to them now. 
We recur again to the parallel case of the Revolu- 
tion. What essential distinction can be drawn be- 
tween the execution of the father and the deposi- 
tion of the son ? What constitutional maxim is there 
which applies to the former and not to the latter? 

1 Members of the High Court of Justice nominated by the 
" Rump " Parliament to try Charles I. There were one hun- 
dred and fifty members, of whom only sixty-seven were present 
at the trial. Several of these were afterwards executed. Three 
of them hid themselves in America. See Hawthorne's tale, The 
Gray Champion. 



62 MAC A UL AY. 

The king can do no wrong. ^ If so, James was as 
innocent as Charles could have been. The minis- 
ter, only, ought to be responsible for the acts of the 
sovereign. If so, why not impeach Jeffreys ^ and re- 
tain James? The person of a king is sacred. Was 
the person of James considered sacred at the Boyne ? ^ 
To discharge cannon against an army in which a king 
is known to be posted is to approach pretty near to 
regicide. Charles, too, it should always be remem- 
bered, was put to death by men who had been exas- 
perated by the hostilities of several years, and who 
had never been bound to him by any other tie than 
that which was common to them with all their fellow- 
citizens. Those who drove James from his throne, 
who seduced his army, who alienated his friends, who 
first imprisoned him in his palace and then turned 
him out of it, who broke in upon his very slumbers 
by imperious messages, who pursued him with fire 
and sword from one part of the empire to another, 
who hanged, drew, and quartered his adherents, and 
attainted his innocent heir,* were his nephew and his 

' The theory of English law which holds ministers responsible 
for the sovereign's acts. 

2 George Jeffreys (1648-1689), the notorious Chief Justice, 
Lord Chancellor, and adviser of James II., who after Mon- 
mouth's rebellion held the celebrated " Bloody Assizes " (1685) 
and earned a reputation for brutality and cruelty second to 
none. 

^ The Boyne is a river in the north of Ireland where a deci- 
sive victory was won on July 1, 1690, by William over James. 
James does not appear to have risked his own person overmuch. 
The anniversary of the battle is still observed by the Orange- 
men, See Macaulay's History, chapter xvi. 

^ James Francis Edward Stnart (1688-1766), son of James II. 
and Mary of Modena. His legitimacy was unjustly suspected, 
and he was attainted by Parliament. He was afterwards known 



MILTON. 63 

two daughters.^ When we reflect on all these things, 
we are at a loss to conceive how the same persons 
who, on the 5th of November, ^ thank God for won- 
derfully conducting his servant William, and for mak- 
ing all opposition fall before him until he became 
our king and governor, can, on the 30th of January,^ 
contrive to be afraid that the blood of the Royal 
Martyr may be visited on themselves and their chil- 
dren. 

We disapprove, we repeat, of the execution of 
Charles; not because the constitution exempts the 
king from responsibility, for we know that all such 
maxims, however excellent, have their exceptions; 
nor because we feel any peculiar interest in his char- 
acter, for we think that his sentence describes him 
with perfect justice as "a tyrant, a traitor, a mur- 
derer, and a public enemy; " but because we are con- 
vinced that the measure was most injurious to the 
cause of freedom. He whom it removed was a cap- 
tive and a hostage ; his heir, to whom the allegiance 
of every Royalist was instantly transferred, was at 
large. The Presbyterians could never have been 
perfectly reconciled to the father ; they had no such 
rooted enmity to the son. The great body of the 
people, also, contemplated that proceeding with feel- 
as the Old Pretender (to distinguish him from his son, Charles 
Edward) and instigated the rising of 1715. 

' William of Orange was the son of James's sister Mary and 
married his daughter Mary. James's other daughter, Anne, 
afterwards queen, took William's part. 

^ The anniversary of both the Gunpowder Plot and William's 
landing in England, marked in the English Prayer Book by a 
special " Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving," which was taken 
out, along with the service in memory of Charles I., in 1859. 

3 The anniversarv of Charles I.'s execution. 



G4 MACAULAY. 

ing-s which, however unreasonable, no government 
could safely venture to outrage.^ 

But though we think the conduct of the Regicides 
blamable, that of Milton appears to us in a very 
different lioht. The deed was done. It could not 
be undone. The evil was incurred, and the object 
was to render it as small as possible. We censure 
the chiefs of the army for not yielding to the pop- 
ular opinion, but we cannot censure Milton for wish- 
ing to change that opinion. The very feeling which 
would have restrained us from committing the act 
would have led us, after it had been committed, to 
defend it against the ravings of servility and super- 
stition. For the sake of public liberty, we wish that 
the thing had not been done while the people disap- 
proved of it. But, for the sake of public liberty, we 
should also have wished the people to approve of it 
when it was done. If anything more were wanting 
to the justification of Milton, the book of Salmasius^ 
would furnish it. That miserable performance is now 
with justice considered only as a beacon to word- 
catchers who wish to become statesmen. The celeb- 
rity of the man who refuted it, the "^nese magni 
dextra,"^ gives it all its fame with the present gener- 

^ Macaulay put substantially these reasons in Milton's mouth 
in the Conversation with Cowley. 

2 The Latinized name of the French scholar Claude Saumaise 
(1588-1653), then professor at Leyden. He had been lucky 
enough to discover the Palatine MS. of the Anthology (see page 
44, note 3) and had won a great reputation for his erudition. He 
was therefore commissioned to write a Defense of Charles I., 
which was a failure and is known only to antiquaries to-day for 
the reasons Macaulay assigns. See page 8, note 1. 

3 Virgil, jEneid, x. 830, " Mnees magni dextra cadis " — " thou 
f allest by the right hand of the great ^neas " — is a proverbial 



MILTON. 65 

atiou. In that age the state of things was different. 
It was not then fully understood how vast an interval 
separates the mere classical scholar from the political 
philosopher. Nor can it be doubted that a treatise 
which, bearing the name of so eminent a critic, at- 
tacked the fundamental principles of all free govern- 
ments, must, if suffered to remain unanswered, have 
produced a most pernicious effect on the public mind. 
We wish to add a few words relative to another 
subject, on which the enemies of Milton delight to 
dwell, — his conduct during the administration of the 
Protector. That an enthusiastic votary of liberty 
should accept office under a military usurper seems, 
no doubt, at first sight, extraordinary. But all the 
circumstances in which the country was then placed 
were extraordinary. The ambition of Oliver was of 
no vulgar kind. He never seems to have coveted 
despotic power. He at first fought sincerely and man- 
fully for the Parliament, and never deserted it till it 
had deserted its duty. If he dissolved it by force, 
it was not till he found that the few members who 
remained after so many deaths, secessions, and ex- 
pulsions were desirous to appropriate to themselves a 
power which they held only in trust, and to inflict 
upon England the curse of a Venetian oligarchy.^ 
But, even when thus placed by violence at the head of 
affairs, he did not assume unlimited power. He gave 
the country a constitution far more perfect than any 
which had at that time been known in the world. ^ 

expression describing the fate suffered by an unknown person at 
the hands of a famous one. 

1 Venice gradually fell into the hands of a small number of 
men, who governed more or less despotically. 

2 The Instrument of Government (1653), which provided for 



QQ MACAULAY. 

He reformed the representative system in a manner 
which has extorted praise even from Lord Clarendon. 
For himself he demanded, indeed, the first place in 
the Commonwealth, but with powers scarcely so great 
as those of a Dutch stadtholder^ or an American 
president. He gave the Parliament a voice in the 
appointment of ministers, and left to it the whole 
legislative authority, not even reserving to himself a 
veto on its enactments ; and he did not require that 
the chief magistracy should be hereditary in his fam- 
ily. Thus far, we think, if the circumstances of the 
time and the opportunities which he had of aggran- 
dizing himself be fairly considered, he will not lose 
by comparison with Washington or Bolivar. ^ Had his 
moderation been met by corresponding moderation, 
there is no reason to think that he would have over- 
stepped the line which he had traced for himself. 
But when he found that his Parliaments questioned 
the authority under which they met, and that he was 
in danger of being deprived of the restricted power 
which was absolutely necessary to his i3ersonal safety, 
then it must be acknowledged he adopted a more 
arbitrary policy. 

Yet, though we believe that the intentions of Crom- 
well were at first honest, thougli we believe that he 
was driven from the noble course which he had 
marked out for himself by the almost irresistible 

the annual meeting of a parliament, representing England, Scot- 
land, and Ireland, did away with rotten boroughs and widened 
the franchise. 

^ That is, governor of a province, a title which came to mean 
the chief executive of the United Provinces. 

2 Simon Bolivar (1783-1830), the " Liberator," was the leader 
in the revolt of the South American colonies against Spain. 



MILTON. 67 

force of circumstances, though we admire, in common 
with all men of all parties, the ability and energy of 
liis splendid administration, we are not pleading for 
arbitrary and lawless power, even in his hands. We 
know that a good constitution is infinitely better than 
the best despot. But we suspect that, at the time of 
which we speak, the violence of religious and political 
enmities rendered a stable and happy settlement next 
to impossible. The choice lay, not between Cromwell 
and liberty, but between Cromwell and the Stuarts. 
That Milton chose well no man can doubt who fairly 
compares the events of the Protectorate with those of 
the thirty years which succeeded it, the darkest and 
most disgraceful in the English annals. Cromwell 
was evidently laying, though in an irregular manner, 
the foundations of an admirable system. Never be- 
fore had religious liberty and the freedom of discus- 
sion been enjoyed in a greater degree. Never had 
the national honor been better upheld abroad, or the 
seat of justice better filled at home. And it was 
rarely that any opposition which stopped short of 
open rebellion provoked the resentment of the liberal 
and magnanimous usurper. The institutions which 
he had established, as set down in the Instrument of 
Government and the Humble Petition and Advice,^ 
were excellent. His practice, it is true, too often 
departed from the theory of these institutions. But 
had he lived a few years longer, it is probable that 
his institutions would have survived him, and that his 
arbitrary practice would have died with him. His 

1 The petition that Cromwell accept the title of king, and 
govern with the acMce of two Houses of Parliament. This was 
accepted in May, 1657, with the rejection, however, of the title 
of king. 



68 MACAULAY. 

power had not been consecrated by ancient prejudices. 
It was upheld only by his great personal qualities. 
Little, therefore, was to be dreaded from a second 
Protector, unless he were also a second Oliver Crom- 
well. The events which followed his decease are the 
most complete vindication of those who exerted them- 
selves to uphold his authority. His death dissolved 
the whole frame of society. The army rose against 
the Parliament, the different corps of the army 
against each other. Sect raved against sect. Party 
plotted against party. The Presbyterians, in their 
eagerness to be revenged on the Independents, ^ sac- 
rificed their own liberty, and deserted all their old 
principles. Without casting one glance on the past, 
or requiring one stipulation for the future, they threw 
down their freedom at the feet of the most frivolous 
and heartless of tyrants. 

Then came those days, never to be recalled without 
a blush, the days of servitude without loyalty and sen- 
suality without love; of dwarfish talents and gigan- 
tic vices; the paradise of cold hearts and narrow 
minds; the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and 
the slave. The king cringed to his rivaP that he 
might trample on his people ; sank into a viceroy of 
France, and pocketed with complacent infamy her de- 
grading insults and her more degrading gold.^ The 
caresses of harlots and the jests of buffoons regu- 
lated the policy of the state. The government had 
just ability enough to deceive, and just religion 

1 Those who, unlike the Presbyterians and Churchmen, de- 
sired no general church government. Milton sided with them. 

2 Louis XIV., of France. 

^ See Green, and especially the details as to the secret Treaty 
of Dover (1670). 



MILTON. 69 

enough to persecute. The prmciples of liberty were 
the scoff of every grinning courtier, and the Ana- 
thema Maranatha^ of every fawning clean. In every 
high place, worship was paid to Charles and James, 
Belial and Moloch ; ^ and England propitiated those 
obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and 
bravest children. Crime succeeded to crime, and dis- 
grace to disgrace, till the race, accursed of God and 
man, was a second time driven forth to wander on the 
face of the earth, and to be a byword and a shaking 
of the head to the nations. 

Most of the remarks which we have hitherto made 
on the public character of Milton apply to him only 
as one of a large body. We shall proceed to no- 
tice some of the peculiarities which distinguished him 
from his contemporaries. And for that purpose it is 
necessary to take a short survey of the parties into 
which the political world was at that time divided. 
We must premise that our observations are intended 
to apply only to those who adhered, from a sincere 
preference, to one or to the other side. In days of 
public commotion every faction, like an Oriental 
army, is attended by a crowd of camp - followers, a 
useless and heartless rabble, who prowl round its line 
of march in the hope of picking up something under 
its protection, but desert it in the day of battle, and 
often join to exterminate it after a defeat. Eng- 
land, at the time of which we are treating, abounded 

^ 1 Corinthians xvi. 22. The phrase is partly Greek, partly 
Syriac, and in the revised version is properly separated by a 
period. Anathema is, Let him be accursed. The apostle then 
turns to the believers, and says to them, Maran atha, i. e., Our 
Lord Cometh. 

'^ See iSIilton's description of these fiends in Paradise Lost^ 
ii. 43-225. 



70 MACAULAY. 

with fickle and selfish politicians, who transferred their 
support to every government as - it rose ; who kissed 
the hand of the king in 1640, and spat in his face in 
1649; who shouted with equal glee when Cromwell 
was inaugurated in Westminster Hall, and when he 
was dug up to be hanged at Tyburn ; wdio dined on 
calves' heads or on broiled rumps, and cut down oak 
branches or stuck them up, as circumstances altered, 
without the slightest shame or repugnance.^ These 
we leave out of the account. We take our estimate 
of parties from those who really deserve to be called 
partisans. 

We would speak first of the Puritans, the most 
remarkable body of men, perhaps, which the world 
has ever produced. The odious and ridiculous parts 
of their character lie on the surface. He that runs 
may read them; nor have there been wanting atten- 
tive and malicious observers to point them out. For 
many years after the Restoration they were the theme 
of unmeasured invective and derision. They were ex- 
posed to the utmost licentiousness of the press and 
of the stage, at the time when the press and the stage 
were most licentious. They were not men of letters; 
they were, as a body, unpopular ; they could not de- 
fend themselves ; and the public would not take them 
under its protection. They were therefore abandoned, 
without reserve, to the tender mercies of the satirists 

^ The references are (1) to the assembling of the Long Par- 
liament ; (2) to the beheading of the kmg ; (3) to the inaugura- 
tion of the Protector in 1653 ; (4) to the treatment of his body 
after the Restoration (Tyburn being the place of execution 
of common malefactors) ; (5) to popular demonstrations of the 
rebels and the king's men, the latter of whom, of course, de- 
spised the Rump Parliament and rejoiced at Prince Charles* 
escape after Worcester by hiding in the historic oak, 



MILTON. 71 

and dramatists. The ostentatious simplicity of their 
dress, their sour aspect, their nasal twang, their stiff 
posture, their long graces, their Hebrew names, the 
scriptural phrases which they introduced on every 
occasion, their contempt of human learning, their 
detestation of polite amusements, were indeed fair 
game for the laughers. But it is not from the laughers 
alone that the philosophy of history is to be learned. 
And he who approaches this subject should carefully 
guard against the influence of that potent ridicule 
which has already misled so many excellent writers. 

" Eceo il fonte del riso, ed ecco il rio 
Che mortali perigli in se contiene : 
Hor qui tener a fren nostro desio, 
Ed esser cauti molto a noi conviene." ^ 

Those who roused the people to resistance; who 
directed their measures through a long series of event- 
ful years; who formed, out of the most unpromis- 
ing materials, the finest army that Europe had ever 
seen; who trampled down king, church, and aristo- 
cracy; who, in the short intervals of domestic sedition 
and rebellion, made the name of England terrible to 
every nation on the face of the earth, — were no vul- 
gar fanatics. Most of their absurdities were mere ex- 
ternal badges, like the signs of freemasonry or the 
dresses of friars.^ We regret that these badges were 

1 " ' See here the fount of laughter ! see tin stream 
To which such fatal qualities belong ! ' 
'Now,' they exclaim'd, 'let us avoid the dream 
Of warm desire, and in resolve be strong.' " 
Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, xv. 57, Fairfax's translation. 

^ Friars is the general title of the four mendicant orders of 
monks : the Franciscans, tlie Dominicans, the Carmelites, and 
the Augustinians. They were at the height of their influence in 
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 



72 MACAULAY. 

not more attractive. We regret that a body to whose 
courage and talents mankind has owed inestimable 
obligations, had not the lofty elegance which distin- 
guished some of the adherents of Charles I., or the 
easy good -breeding for which the court of Charles II. 
was celebrated. But, if we must make our choice, 
we shall, like Bassanio^ in the play, turn from the 
specious caskets which contain only the death's-head 
and the fool's-head, and fix on the plain leaden chest 
nceals the treasure. 
The Puritans were men whose minds had derived 
a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of 
superior beings and eternal interests. Not content 
with acknowledging in general terms an overruling 
Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to 
the will of the Great Being, for whose power nothing 
was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too 
minute. To know Him, to serve Him, to enjoy Him, 
was with them the great end of existence. They re- 
jected with contempt the ceremonious homage which 
other sects substituted for the pure worship of the 
soul. Instead of catching occasional glimpses of the 
Deity through an obscuring veil, the}^ aspired to gaze 
full on the intolerable brightness, and to commune 
with Him face to face. Hence originated their con- 
tempt for terrestrial distinctions. The difference 
between the greatest and the meanest of mankind 
seemed to vanish when compared with the boundless 
interval which separated the whole race from Him on 
whom their own eyes were constantly fixed. They 
recognized no title to superiority but His favor; and, 
confident of that favor, they despised all the accom- 
plishments and all the dignities of the world. If they 
^ See Merchant of Venice, III. ii, 



MILTON. 73 

were unacquainted with the works of philosophers 
and poets, they were deeply read in the oracles of 
God. If their names were not found in the registers 
of heralds, they were recorded in the Book of Life. 
If their steps were not accompanied by a splendid 
train of menials, legions of ministering angels had 
charge over them. Their palaces were houses not 
made with hands; their diadems, crowns of glory 
which should never fade away. On the rich and the 
eloquent, on nobles and priests, they looked down 
with contempt ; for they esteemed themselves rich in 
a more precious treasure, and eloquent in a more 
sublime language, nobles by the right of an earlier 
creation, and . priests by the imposition of a mightier 
hand.^ The very meanest of them was a being to 
whose fate a mysterious and terrible importance be- 
longed, on whose slightest action the spirits of light 
and darkness looked with anxious interest; who had 
been destined, before heaven and earth were created, 
to enjoy a felicity which should continue when heaven 
and earth should have passed away. Events which 
short-sighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes had 
been ordained on his account. For his sake empires 
had risen, and flourished, and decayed. For his sake 
the Almighty had proclaimed His will by the pen of- 
the Evangelist and the harp of the prophet. He had 
been wrested by no common deliverer from the grasp 
of no common foe. He had been ransomed by the 
sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no earthly 
sacrifice. It was for him that the sun had been dark- 
ened, that the rocks had been rent, that the dead had 

^ " Creation " is the teclmieal term for the making of a peer. 
Priests are, of course, ordained by the " imposition " of the 
bishop's hands, 



74 MA CAUL AY. 

risen, that all nature had shuddered at the sufferings 
of her expiring God. 

Thus the Puritan was made up of two different 
men : the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, 
passion; the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. 
He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker, 
but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his 
devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, 
and groans, and tears. He was half maddened by 
glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of 
angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught 
a gleam of the Beatific Vision,^ or woke screaming 
from dreams of everlasting fire. Like yane,^ he 
thought himself intrusted with the sceptre of the 
millennial year. Like Fleetwood,^ he cried in the 
bitterness of his soul that God had hid His face from 
him. But when he took his seat in the council, or 
girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous workings 
of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them. 
People who saw nothing of the godly but their un- 
couth visages, and heard nothing from them but their 

^ The Beatific Vision in mediseval theology meant the direct 
sight of God himself, which constituted the essential happiness 
of the saints in heaven. See Dante's Paradiso, xxxiii. 

2 Sir Harry Vane the younger (1612-1662), Puritan, mystic, 
and intense republican, was Governor of Massachusetts Bay, 
where he got into trouble (1636-37). Then he took sides against 
the king, then against Cromwell, and was finally executed as a 
regicide. He believed in the speedy coming of the millennium, 
or thousand years of Christ's acknowledged supremacy over the 
nations. Milton addressed his seventeenth sonnet to him, — a 
magnificent tribute somewhat undeserved. 

3 Charles Fleetwood (born 1620 ?, died shortly after 1690) 
was a major-general in the army and Cromwell's son-in-law. 
He tried to supplant Richard Cromwell, but had not the neces- 
sary strength of character. 



MILTON. 75 

p^roans and their whining hymns, might laugh at 
them. But those had little reason to laugh who en- 
countered them in the hall of debate or in the field of 
battle. These fanatics brought to civil and military 
affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of 
purpose which some writers have thought inconsistent 
with their religious zeal, but which were in fact the 
necessary effects of it. The intensity of their feelings 
on one subject made them tranquil on every other. 
One overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself 
pity and hatred, ambition and fear. Death had lost 
its terrors and pleasure its charms. They had their 
smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, 
but not for the things of this world. Enthusiasm had 
made them Stoics, Imd cleared their minds from every 
vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above 
the influence of danger and of corruption. It some- 
times might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but 
never to choose unwise means. They went through 
the world, like Sir Artegal's iron man Talus ^ with his 
flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, min- 
gling with human beings, but having neither part 
nor lot in human infirmities; insensible to fatigue, 
to pleasure, and to pain ; not to be pierced by any 
weapon, not to be withstood by any barrier. 

Such we believe to have been the character of the 
Puritans. We perceive the absurdity of their man- 
ners. We dislike the sullen gloom of their domestic 
habits. We acknowledge that the tone of their minds 
was often injured by straining after things too high 
for mortal reach ; and we know that, in spite of their 
hatred of Popery, they too often fell into the worst 
vices of that bad system, — intolerance and extrava- 
^ See the Faerie Queene, v. Artegal represents Justice. 



76 MACAULAY. 

gant austerity; that tliey had their anchorites and 
their crusades, their Dunstans ^ and their De Mont- 
forts, ^ their Dominies ^ and their Escobars.* Yet, 
when all circumstances are taken into consideration, 
we do not hesitate to pronounce them a brave, a wise, 
an honest, and a useful body. 

The Puritans es230used the cause of civil liberty 
mainly because it was the cause of religion. There 
was another party, by no means numerous, but dis- 
tinguished by learning and ability, which acted with 
them on very different principles. We speak of 
those whom Cromwell was accustomed to call the 
Heathens, men who were, in the phraseology of that 
time, doubting Thomases or careless Gallios^ with 
regard to religious subjects, but passionate worship- 
ers of freedom. Heated by the study of ancient lit- 
erature, they set up their country as their idol, and 
proposed to themselves the heroes of Plutarch as their 
examples. They seem to have borne some resem- 
blance to the Brissotines^ of the French Eevolution. 

^ The great Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury, who reg- 
ulated the clergy under Edgar (circa 959). 

- Simon de Montfort (died 1218), father of the greater Eng- 
lish statesman of the same name, was notorious for his cruelty 
in Innocent III.'s crusade against the Albigenses in Provence 
(1208). 

3 St. Dominic (1170-1221) was a Spanish monk, associated 
with de Montfort in his cruelties, and founder of the Domini- 
can Friars, who were great heretic hunters as well as learned 
preachers. See page 71, note 2. 

^ Antonio Escobar (1589-1669), a noted Spanish Jesuit, who 
wrote casuistical treatises on morals to the amount of forty folio 
volumes. He held that the end might justify the means, and 
was criticised for this by Pascal. 

^ See Acts xviii. 17. 

^ The moderate republicans in the French Revolution, better 
known as Girondists. 



MILTON. 77 

But it is not very easy to draw the line of distinction 
between them and their devout associates, whose tone 
and manner they sometimes found it convenient to 
affect, and sometimes, it is probable, imperceptibly 
adopted. 

We now come to the Royalists. We shall attempt 
to speak of them, as we have spoken of their antago- 
nists, with perfect candor. We shall not charge 
upon a whole party the profligacy and baseness of the 
horse boys, gamblers, and bravoes, whom the hope 
of license and plunder attracted from all the dens of 
Whitefriars ^ to the standard of Charles, and who dis- 
graced their associates by excesses which, under the 
stricter discipline of the parliamentary armies, were 
never tolerated. We will select a more favorable 
specimen. Thinking as we do that the cause of the 
king was the cause of bigotry and tyranny, we yet 
cannot refrain from looking with complacency on the 
character of the honest old Cavaliers. We feel a 
national pride in comparing them with the instru- 
ments which the despots of other countries are com- 
pelled to employ, — with the mutes who throng their 
ante-chambers, and the Janissaries ^ who mount guard 
at their gates. Our Royalist countrymen were not 
heartless, dangling courtiers, bowing at every step, 
and simpering at every word. They were not mere 
machines for destruction, dressed up in uniforms, 

^ A district in London, which, on account of old privileges 
preventing the arrest of its inhabitants, was long the home of 
ruffians and idlers. 

2 A famous body of infantry, serving as the Sultan's guard 
and the main part of the standing army, largely composed of 
conscripts taken from the Christian subjects of Turkey. Be- 
coming dangerous, they were exterminated in 1826, having been 
in existence since the fourteenth century. 



78 MACAULAY. 

caned into skill, intoxicated into valor, defending 
without love, destroying without hatred. There was 
a freedom in their subserviency, a nobleness in their 
very degradation. The sentiment of individual inde- 
pendence was strong within them. They were indeed 
misled, but by no base or selfish motive. Compassion 
and romantic honor, the prejudices of childhood and 
the venerable names of history, threw over them a 
spell potent as that of Duessa; and, like the Ked 
Cross Knight,^ they thought that they were doing 
battle for an injured beauty while they defended a 
false and loathsome sorceress. In truth, they scarcely 
entered at all into the merits of the political question. 
It was not for a treacherous king or an intolerant 
church that they fought, but for the old banner which 
had waved in so many battles over the heads of their 
fathers, and for the altars at which they had received 
the hands of their brides. Though nothing could 
be more erroneous than their political opinions, they 
possessed, in a far greater degree than their adversa- 
ries, those -qualities which are the grace of private 
life. With many of the vices of the Eound Table, ^ 
they had also many of its virtues, — courtesy, gen- 
erosity, veracity, tenderness, and respect for women. 
They had far more both of profound and of polite 
learning than the Puritans. Their manners were 
more engaging, their tempers more amiable, their 
tastes more elegant, and their households more cheer- 
ful. 

Milton did not strictly belong to any of the classes 

^ See The Faerie Queene, i. 

^ Tennyson's Last Tournament, though not one of the best of 
the Idylls, describes the vices that undermined King Arthur's 
noble institution. 



MILTON. 79 

which we have described. He was not a Puritan. 
He was not a freethinker. He was not a Koyalist. 
In his character the noblest qualities of every party 
were combined in harmonious union. From the Par- 
liament and from the court, from the conventicle and 
from the Gothic cloister, from the gloomy and sepul- 
chral circles of the Roundheads, and from the Christ- 
mas revel of the hospitable Cavalier, his nature 
selected and drew to itself whatever was great and 
good, while it rejected all the base and pernicious in- 
gredients by which those finer elements were defiled. 
Like the Puritans, he lived 

" As ever in his great Taskmaster's eye." ^ 
Like them, he kept his mind continually fixed on an 
Almighty Judge and an eternal reward. And hence 
he acquired their contempt of external circumstances, 
their fortitude, their tranquillity, their inflexible reso- 
lution. But not the coolest skeptic or the most pro- 
fane scoffer was more perfectly free from the conta- 
gion of their frantic delusions, their savage manners, 
their ludicrous jargon, ^ their scorn of science, and 
their aversion to pleasure. Hating tyranny with a 
perfect hatred, he had nevertheless all the estimable 
and ornamental qualities which were almost entirely 
monopolized by the party of the tyrant. There was 
none who had a stronger sense of the value of litera- 
ture, a finer relish for every elegant amusement, or 
a more chivalrous delicacy of honor and love. Though 
his opinions were democratic, his tastes and his asso- 
ciations were such as harmonize best with monarchy 
and aristocracy. He was under the influence of all 

^ From Milton's fine seventh sonnet, written " on his having 
arrived at the age of twenty-three." 

2 That is, their peculiar application of scriptural language. 



80 MA CAUL AY. 

the feelings by which the gallant Cavaliers were mis- 
led. But of those feelings he was the master and not 
the slave. Like the hero ^ of Homer, he enjoyed all 
the pleasures of fascination; but he was not fasci- 
nated. He listened to the song of the Sirens, yet 
he glided by without being seduced to their fatal 
shore. He tasted the cup of Circe, but he bore 
about him a sure antidote against the effects of its 
bewitching sweetness. The illusions which captivated 
his imagination never impaired his reasoning powers. 
The statesman was proof against the splendor, the 
solemnity, and the romance which enchanted the poet. 
Any person who will contrast the sentiments expressed 
in his treatises on Prelacy ^ with the exquisite lines 
on ecclesiastical architecture and music in the "Pen- 
seroso,"^ which was published about the same time, 
will understand our meaning. This is an inconsis- 
tency which, more than anything else, raises his char- 
acter in our estimation, because it shows how many 
private tastes and feelings he sacrificed in order to 
do what he considered his duty to mankind. It is 
the very struggle of the noble Othello.* His heart 
relents, but his hand is firm. He does naught in 
hate, but all in honor. He kisses the beautiful de- 
ceiver before he destroys her. 

^ Ulysses. See Odyssey, x. and xii. 

^ That is, the prose pamphlets, Of Reformation touching Church 
Discipline in England, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, The Reason of 
Church Government urg'd against Prelaty, etc., all dating from 
1641. 

8 The lines are 155-166. II Penseroso was first published 
in the 1645 edition of Milton's collected Minor Poems. It had 
been written from twelve to fourteen years earlier. 

* See Act V., scene ii., of the play which Macaulay, writing the 
year before of Dante, had declared to be "perhaps the greatest 
work in the world." 



MILTON. 81 

That from which the public character of Milton 
derives its great and peculiar splendor still remains 
to be mentioned. If he exerted himself to overthrow 
a forsworn king and a ^persecuting hierarchy, he ex- 
erted himself in conjunction with others. But the 
glory of the battle which he fought for the species of 
freedom which is the most valuable, and which was 
then the least understood, the freedom of the human 
mind, is all his own. Thousands and tens of thou- 
sands among his contemporaries raised their voices 
against ship money and the Star Chamber. But 
there were few indeed who discerned the more fearful 
evils of moral and intellectual slavery, and the bene- 
fits which would result from the liberty of the press ^ 
and the unfettered exercise of private judgment. ^ 
These were the objects which Milton justly conceived 
to be the most important. He was desirous that the 
people should think for themselves as well as tax 
themselves, and should be emancipated from the do- 
minion of prejudice as well as from that of Charles. 
He knew that those who, with the best intentions, 
overlooked these schemes of reform, and contented 
themselves with pulling down the king and imprison- 
ing the malignants,^ acted like the heedless brothers 
in his own poem,^ who, in their eagerness to disperse 

^ It was in defense of the liberty of the press that Milton 
published, in 1644, his Areopagitica, probably the finest and cer- 
tainly the most often read of his prose works. 

2 Most of the early prose tracts would seem to fall under this 
head. 

3 That is, virulently harmful (to the cause of liberty), — a 
term much applied by the Parliament men to the king's sup- 
porters. 

^ Comus. The lines below are 815-819. At the beginning 
of the next paragraph Macaulay, by paraphrasing, explains the 
quotation. 



82 MACAULAY. 

the train of the sorcerer, neglected the means of liber- 
ating the captive. They thought only of conquering 
when they should have thought of disenchanting. 

" Oh, ye mistook, ye should have siiatch'd his wand, 
And bound him fast ; without his rod revers'd, 
And backward mutters of dissevering power, 
We cannot free the Lady that sits here 
In stony fetters fix'd, and motionless." 

To reverse the rod, to spell the charm backward, to 
break the ties which bound a stupefied people to the 
seat of enchantment, was the noble aim of Milton. 
To this all his public conduct was directed. For 
this he joined the Presbyterians ; for this he forsook 
them. He fought their perilous battle, but he turned 
away with disdain from their insolent triumph. He 
saw that they, like those whom they had vanquished, 
were hostile to the liberty of thought. He therefore 
joined the Independents, and called upon Cromwell to 
break the secular chain, and to save free conscience 
from the paw of the Presbyterian wolf.^ With a 
view to the same great object, he attacked the li- 
censing system, 2 in that sublime treatise which every 
statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand and 
as frontlets between his eyes. His attacks were, in 
general, directed less against particular abuses than 
against those deejily seated errors on which almost all 
abuses are founded, — the servile worship of eminent 
men and the irrational dread of innovation. 

^ " Secular chain " (see Sonnet xvi.) refei^s to the alliance be- 
tween church and state. In Lycidas (1. 128), " the grim wolf 
with privy paw " was probably the Church of Rome ; but this 
was written in 1637, when Laud's leaning toward Rome terrified 
the poet. Later, it was the narrow policy of the Presbyterians 
that alarmed him. 

2 That is, as applied to publications. See the Areopagitica. 



MILTON. 83 

That he might shake the foundations of these de- 
basing sentiments more effectually, he always selected 
for himself the boldest literary services. He never 
came up in the rear when the outworks had been 
carried and the breach entered. He pressed into the 
forlorn hope. At the beginning of the changes, he 
wrote with incomparable energy and eloquence against 
the bishops. But, when his opinion seemed likely to 
prevail, he passed on to other subjects, and abandoned 
prelacy to the crowed of writers who now hastened to 
insult a falling party. There is no more hazardous 
enterprise than that of bearing the torch of truth into 
those dark and infected recesses in which no light has 
ever shone. But it was the choice and the pleasure 
of Milton to penetrate the noisome vapors, and to 
brave the terrible exj^losion. Those who most disap- 
prove of his opinions must respect the hardihood with 
which he maintained them. He, in general, left to 
others the credit of expounding and defending the 
popular parts of his religious and political creed. He 
took his own stand upon those which the great body 
of his countrymen reprobated as criminal, or derided 
as paradoxical. He stood up for divorce and regi- 
cide.^ He attacked the prevailing systems of educa- 
tion. ^ His radiant and beneficent career resembled 
that of the god of light and fertility : — 

" Nitor in adversum ; nee me, qui cjetera, vincit 
Impetus, et rapido contrarius evehor orbi." ^ 

1 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1G43), and other tracts; 
Eikonoklastes (1649), the Defensio contra Salmasium, etc. 

2 Of Education. To Master S. Hartlib (1644). 

^ From Ovid, Metamorphoses, ii. 72, 73 : "I contend against 
opposition ; nor does that force which conquers all else subdue 
me, and I ride on in a contrary way to the rapid heavens." The 
reference is, of course, to the sun. 



84 MACAU LAY. 

It is to be regretted that the prose writings of Mil- 
ton should in our time be so little read. As compo- 
sitions, they deserve the attention of every man who 
wishes to become acquainted with the full power of 
the English language. They abound with passages 
compared with which the finest declamations of Burke ^ 
sink into insignificance. They are a perfect field of 
cloth of gold.^ The style is stiff with gorgeous em- 
broidery. Not even in the earlier books of the " Para- 
dise Lost " has the great poet ever risen higher than 
in those parts of his controversial works in which his 
feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts of 
devotional and lyric rapture. It is, to borrow his 
own majestic language, "a sevenfold chorus of halle- 
lujahs and harping symphonies." 

We had intended to look more closely at these per- 
formances, to analyze the peculiarities of the diction, 
to dwell at some length on the sublime wisdom of 
the " Areopagitica " and the nervous rhetoric of the 
"Iconoclast," and to point out some of those magnifi- 
cent passages which occur in the treatise "Of Refor- 
mation"^ and the "Animadversions on the Remon- 

1 The great philosophic statesman Edmund Burke (1729- 
1797), noted for the splendor of his style. The student may 
compare the superb passage from the opening of the Second 
Book of The Reason of Church Government (from which Macau- 
lay quotes at the close of the paragraph) with Burke's tribute to 
Marie Antoinette at the beginning of his Reflections on the French 
Revolution. 

2 This refers to the great meeting between Henry VIII. and 
Francis I. in 1520, on the plain of Ardres. 

2 Published in 1641. A reply to Bishop Hall, who had at- 
tacked a famous Presbyterian tract known by the curious name 
of Smectymnuus, — formed from the initials of its authors. 



MILTON, 85 

fitrant." But the length to which our remarks have 
already extended renders this impossible. 

We must conclude. And yet we can scarcely tear 
ourselves away from the subject. The days immedi- 
ately following the publication of this relic of Milton 
appear to be peculiarly set apart and consecrated to 
his memory. And we shall scarcely be censured if, 
on this his festival, we be found lingering near his 
shrine, how worthless soever may be the offering 
which we bring to it. While this book lies on our 
table, we seem to be contemporaries of the writer. 
We are transported a hundred and fifty years back. 
We can almost fancy that we are visiting him in his 
small lodging; that we see him sitting at the old 
organ beneath the faded green hangings ; that we can 
catch the quick twinkle of his eyes, rolling in vain to 
find the day ; that we are reading in the lines of his 
noble countenance the proud and mournful history of 
his glory and his affliction.^ We image to ourselves 
the breathless silence in which we should listen to his 
slightest word ; the passionate veneration with which 
we should kneel to kiss his hand and weep upon it ; 
the earnestness with which we should endeavor to 
console him, if indeed such a spirit could need con- 
solation, for the neglect of an age unworthy of his 
talents and his virtues; the eagerness with which we 
should contest with his daughters, or with his Quaker 
friend EUwood,^ the privilege of reading Homer to 

^ These details are taken from the notes of the painter Rich- 
ardson, and were furnished by a Doctor Wright, an old clergy- 
man who visited the poet. (Masson, Memoir prefixed to the 
Eversley edition of the poems.) 

^ Thomas Ellwood (1639-1713), a Quaker, who underwent 
much persecution for his faith, made the acquaintance of Milton 
in 1662, and became his fast friend and assistant in his work. 



86 MACAULAY. 

him, or of taking down the immortal accents which 
flowed from his lips. 

These are perhaps foolish feelings. Yet we cannot 
be ashamed of them; nor shall we be sorry if what 
we have written shall in any degree excite them in 
other minds. We are not much in the habit of idol- 
izing either the living or the dead. And we think 
that there is no more certain indication of a weak and 
ill-regulated intellect than that propensity which, for 
want of a better name, we will venture to christen 
Boswellism. But there are a few characters which 
have stood the closest scrutiny and the severest tests, 
which have been tried in the furnace and have proved 
pure, which have been weighed in the balance and 
have not been found wanting, which have been de- 
clared sterling by the general consent of mankind,' 
and which are visibly stamped with the image and 
superscription of the Most High. These great men 
we trust that we know how to prize, and of these 
was Milton. The sight of his books, the sound of 
his name, are pleasant to us. His thoughts resemble 
those celestial fruits and flowers which the Virgin 
Martyr ^ of Massinger sent down from the gardens of 
Paradise to the earth, and which were distinguished 
from the productions of other soils, not only by supe- 
rior bloom and sweetness, but by miraculous efficacy 
to invigorate and to heal. They are powerful, not 
only to delight, but to elevate and purify. Nor do 
we envy the man who can study either the life or the 

He has left in his Autobiography many interesting details with 
regard to his intercourse with the poet, whom he somewhat in- 
cited to write Paradise Regained. See Whittier's Snow-Bound. 

1 One of the best of the plays of Philip Massinger (1583- 
1640), the last of the great Elizabethan dramatists. 



MILTON. 87 

writings of the great poet and patriot without aspir- 
ing to emulate, not indeed the sublime works with 
which his genius has enriched our literature, but the 
zeal with which he labored for the public good, the 
fortitude with which he endured every private calam- 
ity, the lofty disdain with which he looked down on 
temptations and dangers, the deadly hatred which he 
bore to bigots and tyrants, and the faith which he so 
sternly kept with his country and with his fame.^ 

1 Matthew Arnold (in A French Critic on Milton) finds fault 
with the rhetoric of this passage, and justly, if we are to con- 
sider Macaulay as playing the part of a critic. But Arnold here, 
as elsewhere, seems not sufficiently to remember that criticism 
is not the whole end of literature. Macaulay was endeavoring 
to persuade his readers to catch some of his own enthusiasm 
for Milton, — a worthy purpose, which was furthered by his re- 
markably effective rhetoric. 



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leather. Prices, 50, 60 and 70 cents, net. With introductions, notes, and 
illustrations. 

Rolfe's Students' Series of Standard English Poems for Schools and 
Colleges. Edited by W. f. Rolfe, Lift. D., and containing complete poems 
by Scott, Tennyson, Byron, and Morris. With a carefully revised text, co- 
pious explanatory and critical notes, and numerous illustrations. 1 1 vols, 
square i5mo. Price per volume, 75 cents. To teachers by mail, 53 cents, 
postpaid ; by express, unpaid, 47 cents. 

Modem Classics. A Library of complete Essays, Tales, and Poem& 
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averaging 310 pages. Each volume, 32mo, 40 cents, net. 

The Riverside Library for Young People. A series of volumes 
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Adventure. With Maps, Portraits, etc. Designed especially for boys and 
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uniform, i6mo, 75 cents ; to teachers, 64 cents, postpaid. 11 volumes have 
been published. 

American Poems. Selected from the Works of Longfellow, Whittier, 
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With Biographical Sketches and Notes. lamo, ^i.co, net. Printed from 
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American Prose. Selections from the Writings of Hawthorne, Ir- 
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ited by Horace E. Scudder. With Introductions and Notes. i2mo, 
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Masterpieces of American Literature. Complete Prose and Poetical 

Selections from the works of Franklin, Irving, Bryant, Webster, Everett, 
Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Thoreau, and 
O'Reilly. With a Portrait and Biographical Sketch of each author. 
Adapted for use in Grammar Schools, High Schools, and Academies as a 
Reading Book and as a Text-Book in American Literature. i2mo, ^i.oo, 
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Masterpieces of British Literature. Complete Prose and Poetical 

Selections from the works of Ruskin, Macaulay, Dr. John Brown, Tenny- 
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Goldsmith, Addison, Steele, Milton, Bacon. With a Portrait and Biograph- 
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Ballads and Lyrics. Selected and Arranged by 'Henry Cabot 
Lodge. i6mo, ^i.oo, net. 

Poetry for Children. Edited by Samuel Eliot, Late Superintend- 
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The Repuhlic of Childhood. Three volumes specially prepared for 
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Literary Landmarks. By MaryE. Burt. i6mo, 75 cents ; to teach- 
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Words and Their Uses. By Richard Grant White. School Edi- 
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Primer of American Literature. By C. F. Richardson. A New 
and Revised Edition (1896). 71st Thousand. i8mo, 35 cents, net. 

Handbook of Universal Literature. By Anne C. Lynch Botta. 
44th New and Revised Edition. i2mo, $2.00, net. 

Vocal Culture. Bv William Russell. Seventy - ninth Edition. 
Revised by Francis T. Russell. i2mo, $1.00, net. 

The Synthetic Philosophy of Expression, as applied to the Arts of 
Reading, Oratory, and Recitation. By MosES True Brown. i2mo, 
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The Idylls of the King-. By Alfred Tennyson. i6mo, 50 cents, 
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Colbum's (Warren) First Lessons : An Intellectual Arithmetic upon 
the Inductive Method of Instruction. A New, Carefully Revised, and En- 
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Andrews &/ Stoddard's Latin Grammar. i2mo, $1.05, net. 

The Same. Revised by Henry Preble. i2mo, $1.12, net. 

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Fiske's (John) Civil Government in the United States, considered with 
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Fiske's (John) History of the United States, for Schools. With Topics 
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A Bird's-Eye View of our Civil War. By Theodore Ayrault 
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Epitome of Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modem History. By Carl Ploetz. 
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English Constitutional History. From the Teutonic Conquest to the 
Present Time. By Thomas Pitt Taswell-Langmead. Fifth Edition. 
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Greek Poets in English Verse. By Various Translators. Edited, 
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The Odyssey of Homer. Translated into English Prose by George 
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The Iliad of Homer. Translated into En5:lish Blank Verse bv Wil- 
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The Odyssey of Homer. Translated into English Blank Verse by 
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Faust. A Tragedy by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Translated into 
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ers, ^2.13, postpaid. 

The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Translated by Henry 
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The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Translated by Charles 
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The Atlantic Life-Size Portraits of Whittier, Lowell, Emerson, Haw- 
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Masterpieces Portraits and Authors' Homes. 

Half-tone portraits (with facsimile autographs) of Addison, Bacon. Brown, 
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Franklin, Goldsmith, Gra}'', Hawthorne, Holmes, Irving, Lamb, Longfellow, 
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Whittier, Wordsworth, similar to those in Masterpieces of American Litera- 
ture and Masterpieces of British Literature. Cabinet photograph size, on 
paper, 7^ X 4I inches. 

Half-tone pictures of the homes of Bryant, Emerson, Hawthorne, Holmes, 
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I.ongfallow's Residence. A colored lithograph of the historic mansion 
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Fine Stesl Portraits (the size of cabinet photographs) of over 90 of 
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